


Uncertain Thing

by vain_glorious



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alien Biology, Gen, Illnesses, Medical Trauma, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2017-12-15 23:59:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/855471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vain_glorious/pseuds/vain_glorious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of medical issues threatens Sheppard's place on the team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

M3X-371 was a beautiful planet. It was remarkable for soaring cliffs, deep gorges, and snowy mountain peaks. The cliffs were more than pretty; they contained deep, winding passages that had once provided sanctuary to a community hiding from the Wraith. Once being the operative word – one side of the largest mountain had been turned into a giant pile of rocky debris, and the only people who lived on this planet now were a conglomeration of four tiny tribes – each a refugee from cullings on other planets – who farmed goats on the side of the mountains.

It might have been testament to the fact that John Sheppard had been in the Pegasus galaxy a bit too long because his primary reaction to this was wondering if the tribes would be so kind as to move their grazing flock so he could go skiing.

“You think the goats are still here in the winter?” he asked Ronon, walking at his six.

“Yeah,” Ronon said, immediately.

“How come?” Sheppard asked, trying not to sound disappointed. “Won’t they freeze or starve?”

“No,” Ronon said.

“How do you know?” Sheppard asked, a bit testily.

“I’ve been here before,” Ronon said. “In the snow. I stole a goat and ate it.”

“Oh.” Sheppard paused. “So, was that mountain face intact last time you were here?”

He looked backwards, totally expecting the annoyed glance Ronon was flicking his direction.

“No,” Ronon said. “I was only here an hour; it doesn’t take long to catch a goat.” A few seconds later: “The goat was really tasty.”

“Our new friends are already letting us climb all over their sacred mountain looking for a ZPM, buddy,” Sheppard said. “Let’s not push it.”

“They have lots,” Ronon said.

“I said no,” Sheppard said.

“Sheppard, you find anything yet?” McKay’s voice crackled in his earpiece.

“Just goat turds,” Sheppard replied.

“Eww.”

“We haven’t reached the caverns yet,” he added.

McKay and Teyla were canvassing the other side of the mountain – the shattered face. He had pointed out that if there was a ZPM here, it was probably what the Wraith had been aiming at. This was perfectly logical, but McKay had also muttered something about the energy signal being weak enough to be coming from either side, and then he and Teyla claimed the half that was distinctly lacking in animal feces.

The caverns didn’t have as much shit, and it seemed to be from a different species, but that was about it. It was dark and wet, and smelled terrible. Every time Sheppard touched a stone wall, his hand came away covered in slime. It was also cramped, forcing both men to hunch over. Ronon eventually dropped into a full crawl, apparently not minding touching the utterly disgusting floor. Sheppard refused to do the same, settling for occasionally smacking the top of his head against the low ceiling and getting a painful twinge in his lower back.

“I don’t see a ZPM,” Ronon announced. Sheppard could hear him squelching in the muck on the floor, and very much agreed with the unspoken sentiment that they should get the hell out of here.

Unfortunately, the tablet Sheppard was clutching to his chest was glowing a consistent green. There was something here more interesting than Pegasus galaxy batshit.

“Sorry, buddy,” Sheppard said over his shoulder.

Ronon harrumphed and somehow managed to send a splatter of slime up Sheppard’s pantleg as he moved forward.

“Hey!” He gave some thought to promising Ronon a goat if he stuck it out. Maybe the villagers would have a goat-roasting celebration if they found something cool.

Sheppard never got the chance to try bribery. He turned to look backwards at Ronon, at the same time that his front foot slipped in place. The instinct to protect his face stronger than the desire to avoid getting screamed at by Rodney for breaking a tablet, Sheppard let go of the device. He heard it crash and the screen shatter, his hands out to catch himself on the ground. But the ground wasn’t there, and Sheppard kept falling.

~

Sheppard’s first awareness was of a vague, persistent throbbing in the top of his head. This realization was followed by the one that he was awake, which meant he was alive. His last memory was of an endless fall through total darkness. It seemed like he should be in a lot more pain. He didn’t really hurt, but he also didn’t really, well, _feel._ He was covered by a dense, bodily fog. Other than the slight headache, Sheppard was barely aware of his body.

He had a moment of gratitude towards Keller and her wonderful drugs. He had to be in the infirmary, and she’d put him back together again. Once he opened his eyes, though, she’d be all over him with the blinding penlight and probably scolding him for finding a hole to fall down. All the same, Sheppard slowly lifted his lids. It was actually kind of hard, required a lot more concentration than it should.

Immediately, he knew he wasn’t in the infirmary. He opened his eyes not to the pale blue ceiling of Atlantis, but to the brown stitching of Ronon’s leather coat. It was bunched up around his face, almost folded over his eyes.

“Hrmph?” Sheppard said. He tried to say actual words, but that was what came out.

It made the coat move. The leather blurred in front Sheppard’s face and he had to close his eyes because all of sudden he was very dizzy. He had the vague sensation that more than the coat was moving. With his eyes clenched shut, he guessed he’d been wrapped in Ronon’s coat, probably being carried by the man himself, and was now being put back on the goopy ground.

“Sheppard?” came Ronon’s voice, close to his ear.

Slowly, Sheppard opened his eyes. Ronon’s face was right there, directly in front of his face. It was hard to see much else. They were still in darkness, meaning they were still in the caverns. Ronon looked dirty, face and hair smeared with the stuff that coated every surface of this place.

Ronon’s head moved closer, peering at Sheppard. The motion made his vision spin and he decided it’d be good to close his eyes.

“Sheppard?” Ronon said again. “You okay?”

Sheppard tried to answer, was disappointed that it mostly came out as a groan.

“Wha…What…happen?”

“You fell,” Ronon said, reliably direct.

“Mmph.” Sheppard risked opening one eye and squinting. Ronon looked worried, underneath all the grime that was covering him. “I’m okay,” Sheppard murmured. “I think. ‘Lil dizzy. My head hurts.”

He decided it might be good to check on the rest of him, the parts he couldn’t really feel. Trying not to move at all, staving off the vertigo, Sheppard peered down at himself with one eye. He was indeed wrapped in Ronon’s coat. It, too, was filthy. More interestingly, he didn’t seem to be wearing anything else. It took a lot of effort, but Sheppard managed to grab at the shoulder of Ronon’s coat and pull it out. He was utterly naked beneath it. Even his boots were gone. Trying not to sound ungrateful, Sheppard pushed the leather back in place.

“Okay,” he said, trying to find Ronon’s face again. But the man wasn’t holding still, and it was better to just shut his eyes. “And you took my clothes off why?”

There was silence for a moment. Then Ronon rumbled softly in what sounded like relief that Sheppard was coherent enough to want his pants back.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Found you like this when I woke up.”

“Woke up?” Sheppard echoed.

That was all bad news, but the fog that held the rest of him was moving to encompass his skull, now. It was absolutely crushing and Sheppard didn’t even try to resist.

“Gotta get out of here,” he ordered Ronon, but he wasn’t sure if that was out loud or not.

~

Sheppard slept through being carried out of the caverns. He woke up periodically, usually when Ronon put him down and the coat twisted such that the cold, sticky gunk on the floor managed to get all up his legs. It should have been really disgusting, but beyond a vague awareness that he was wet and clammy, he didn’t process much. Later, he would wonder how in the hell Ronon was managing to move a totally unresponsive adult male while unable to stand fully. Ronon also navigated a way out of the mountain despite the fact that they evidently weren’t anywhere near where they’d started, they didn’t have a map, and it was pitch black.

Even though he was occasionally conscious, Sheppard couldn’t express just how awesome Ronon was in getting them out of the batshit-covered caves. He thought he might have gotten in a supportive, manly squeeze on Ronon’s arm, but he wasn’t sure. Sheppard didn’t hurt, but he was so, so sleepy. It was impossible to stay awake for long, and even harder to communicate anything when he was.

This sucked and probably should have been scary.

It wasn’t, even though Sheppard knew it was weird. He didn’t feel bad, at all. The top of his head stung lightly, but other than that he was completely calm and pain-free. Part of it was the inability to stay awake. It was a deep and unnatural sleep, but it was gentle and soothing. The only thing that bothered Sheppard was how worried Ronon looked every time he peered down at him. He would have liked to reassure him, but couldn’t keep his thoughts organized or his eyes open long enough to even try.

Ronon must have earned a merit badge in orienteering from the Satedan boy scouts, because the next time Sheppard opened his eyes, there was bright blue sky overhead. He blinked slowly, found that the clouds traveling swiftly across his vision didn’t make him dizzy. That was a step in the right direction.

Then something golden flashed in the corner of his eye. Sheppard managed to follow it, discovered Teyla was leaning over him and talking. He missed whatever it was she said, couldn’t find the energy to process the words.

“Hey,” he managed.

Teyla’s eyes went wider and she smiled in relief. Her mouth was moving faster. She sounded excited, but he still couldn’t really focus much. He heard his own name over and over again, just kind of phased out on the rest of it.

“I’m okay,” he told her. Sheppard remembered he was wearing only Ronon’s coat and looked down to make sure it was securely in place. It kind of wasn’t, so he tried to pull it down. It was bunched under his back and legs and didn’t move. Teyla noticed what he was doing and decided to try to help.

It had to be something alien that prevented him from melting in embarrassment, instead sending another tidal wave of exhaustion and knocking him out again.

Unfortunately, Sheppard also slept through his return to Atlantis. If he’d been conscious, he would have insisted on walking through on his own. It was bad for morale when the military leader couldn’t make it home under his own power. So, Ronon carried him, of course. Wrapped in nothing but a leather coat, crossing the threshold in the arms of a giant who was also wearing mostly leather, his arrival might have looked like the cover of a gay romance novel. Sheppard didn’t know if those existed, but was fairly sure there’d be a photoshopped version of one as soon as everyone was confident he wasn’t going to die.

These were among his thoughts when he woke in the infirmary, along with a generous side helping of being kind of pissed off about it. It was almost immediately reassuring, since if he was angry he was probably no longer under the influence of the unnatural calming fatigue that had hit him so hard before.

He still wasn’t really in pain, which was nice.

One thing unconsciousness had spared him was experiencing the inevitable sponge bath. Depending on which nurse you got, those were either awkward and embarrassing or more painful than a gutshot. Sheppard felt fresh and clean, and ridiculously pleased to be clad in patient scrubs. He also had an IV lead in his arm, and the bag looked to be nothing more than standard fluids.

“Colonel?” Dr. Keller had come up on the other side of the bed, peering over him.

“Hey,” Sheppard said, finding his voice thick and croaky. He cleared his throat. “What’s up?”

“How are you feeling?” Keller asked. But she put a hand on his forehead rather than check any of the monitors, so it was probably mostly rhetorical.

“Okay,” he said, honestly. “What happened?”

“We’d like to know that, too,” Keller said. She withdrew her hand, crossed her arms under her bust.

“Am I okay?” Sheppard asked. It was always good to check. “Where’s my team?”

“The only thing I could find wrong with you,” Keller said, “is some cuts on your scalp. Not deep but wide enough to bother you while they healed. You have some surgical glue in there.”

Sheppard stuck a hand up and patted around. The skin was tender and poking it wasn’t the brightest idea.

He must have made a face, because Keller shrugged. “I know it hurts, but anything else would have required me to shave more hair. Rodney said you’d lose your will to live.”

“You shaved some?” Sheppard asked, alarmed. Then, “Hey, at least mine will always grow back.”

Keller rolled her eyes. “I shaved a tiny, tiny patch, I promise.”

Sheppard poked around a little more. He could feel bare skin, but it was hard to tell how much. He didn’t think Keller would give him a mirror.

“Where’s my team?” he asked again.

“Probably getting clean,” Keller said. “They were pretty disgusting.”

“That planet had more shit than you would believe,” Sheppard said.

Keller nodded. “Ronon might lose some hair, too. I’m not sure he’ll be able to wash it out. It looked like he rolled in it.”

“I think he did,” Sheppard said. “He okay?”

“Everyone else was fine,” Keller assured him. “Very worried about you.”

“But I’m fine?”

“You were missing for twenty-four hours,” Keller said, frowning. “And wouldn’t wake up when Ronon found you.”

“Twenty-four hours?” Sheppard asked, shocked.

He didn’t get the chance to say anything further, because Rodney strolled into the examination room.

“Oh, hey, sleeping beauty’s awake,” he said. He paused, did a double take. “You look like you’re wearing a little bald yarmulke.”

Sheppard’s hand shot to the top of his head, and Rodney grinned.

~

The little patch of hair Keller had shaved was so tiny it was barely noticeable from the front. Rodney, who had no business making jokes about anyone’s hairline, was still doing his best. Sheppard figured most of it was relief he was alive to be made fun of, but it was still annoying. The rest of the team had followed right behind Rodney, but neither had said a thing about his hair.

Keller let him out of the infirmary to report to Sam. She didn’t, however, let him get dressed.

“You’re coming right back,” she said, voice steely. “For observation.”

“Hey,” Sheppard said.

“Spending the night,” Keller continued.

“Hey,” Sheppard said again.

Keller ignored him. “You too, Ronon.”

Ronon’s eyebrows slunk low. “Why?”

“Valid medical reasons,” Keller retorted. “And because I said so.”

Sheppard didn’t entirely disagree once he heard those reasons, presented to Carter at the debriefing. His own memories of the planet’s caverns consisted solely of sleepy, goopy, darkness and falling down a hole. Ronon’s report, unfortunately, consisted solely of jumping down a dark, goopy hole after Sheppard.

Somewhere in there, though, was a missing day. The thick stone had blocked all radio transmission, so it had been a few hours until Teyla and McKay even suspected something was up. It had taken another few hours for Sheppard and Ronon to miss the rendezvous time and for Carter to send backup. In the time it had taken for Lorne’s team to deliberate the best strategy in entering dark, disgusting, and unknown parts to find the missing pair without vanishing themselves, Ronon had carried Sheppard out of the mountain.

It was both simple and sinister.

Ronon remembered nothing. It’d been too dark to see after losing their light source  - Sheppard had dropped his flashlight. He did admit that he must have lost consciousness as well, since he had woken up at some point after following Sheppard down. But he didn’t remember how.  Keller found no signs of head trauma. Even Sheppard’s scalp lacerations were mild and shallow, likely the result of scraping his head along the ceiling than of any concussion-inducing blow.

In as much as it was nice that no one was hurt, it was also disturbing. Sheppard had taken a header that probably should have cost him a lot of teeth. Ronon had jumped feet first, at least, but still.

Keller’s bloodwork explained a little. Both men had an alien substance flowing in their veins. Keller – and her database – had never seen it before. It shared chemical similarities with certain forms of anesthesia, and her working theory was that it was what had knocked them out.

“Did the air smell funny?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Sheppard said.

“Like shit,” Ronon said, which was true.

Carter coughed a little, but didn’t bother to reprimand him.

“I was thinking chemicals,” Keller said. “Artificial?”

“No,” Ronon said. “Like shit.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “But I buy being drugged. I actually felt kinda...good. Out of it, but not upset about it. Kinda stoned.”

“Your levels were higher,” Keller said. “Substantially. It explains why Ronon was able to get moving, if nothing else.”

“Nothing else,” Sheppard said, since Ronon could probably keep moving unless his legs were amputated. And he was righteously a little jealous of that.

“I didn’t feel anything different,” Ronon said, shrugging.

“I’m gonna need blood samples from McKay and Teyla,” Keller said. “For comparison.”

Teyla inclined her head. “Of course.”

“I felt fine,” Rodney said, scowling at the thought of a needle. “The whole time.”

“Our caverns were not intact,” Teyla said. “If there was an airborne substance, perhaps it was not concentrated enough to affect us.”

“That’s a possibility,” Keller agreed. “Frankly, I’m less worried about what it was and more worried about the why. Colonel Sheppard and Ronon weren’t hurt, thank God, but I’d like an explanation as to what happened to them.”

“Like how Sheppard lost his clothes,” Carter said. She sounded concerned, not amused.

“Maybe he took them off,” McKay suggested.

“What?” asked Sheppard, glaring.

“I had a roommate in grad school,” McKay said. “Huge pothead. Also naked, a lot.”

Carter shut McKay up with a single, pointed look. It was a beautiful skill.

“Did you find anything related to the energy readings?” Carter asked.

“No,” McKay, sounding a little glum. “But we did stop looking when we realized those two were gone.”

“Shit,” Ronon said, again. “Nothing else.”

“I think it’s reasonable to assume that those energy readings might be related to whatever it was you two experienced,” Carter said. “I’m putting a halt on that search ‘til we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

“I’m going to keep the colonel and Ronon overnight for observation,” Keller said. “I want to monitor them and make sure their bloodwork gets back to normal.”

Sheppard harrumphed. She wasn’t wrong, but goddamn. Ronon scowled, too.

“Good,” Carter said, which meant it was an order. “We might just have gotten really lucky,” she continued.

She could say that because she hadn’t ended up naked and covered in shit, and carried into the gateroom in that condition.

In a nice change of pace, nothing really awful happened in the immediate aftermath of the failed mission to M3X-371. Neither Rodney nor Teyla had anything nasty in their own tests, which was both good and also kind of unfair. Keller kept Sheppard and Ronon in the infirmary for a few days, until she was satisfied that the alien chemical was on its own way out. It was boring and Sheppard thought Ronon was going to make a break for it, but other than that it was kind of an unexpected relief that nothing horrible was going to happen to them.

Planetside, a team of anthropologists came back from interviewing the natives with the message that it was surprising that Sheppard’s team had come back at all, having gone into the sacred mountain without undergoing the proper religious rituals. They didn’t have anything else to add.

Carter cancelled any further investigation into the mysterious energy readings, calling it a wash. McKay pouted for a few days. Sheppard invited him to be the one to go back to batshit covered caves and mysterious naked unconsciousness, and he didn’t protest too much after that. In less than a week, they were chasing after another possible ZPM, and to be honest Sheppard pretty much purposefully forgot all about his little naked adventure.

~

About a month or so later, Sheppard was back in the infirmary because he weaved when he should have dodged, and Ronon popped him right in the nose while they were sparring. Usually, they both only went in for training injuries if stitches were needed. Sheppard stalled as long as possible, but the damn thing would not stop bleeding. His gym shirt was turning crimson and he’d spat enough blood on to the floor that it was beginning to look like a murder scene. Somebody would probably be mad about that, but Sheppard knew from experience that swallowing too much blood only led to really disgusting puking.

“Let’s go,” Ronon said, finally, making eyes at the door. He of all people understood Sheppard’s aversion to the infirmary, and Sheppard appreciated that he wasn’t really freaking out about it. Well, he appreciated it, but a smaller part of him wondered if Ronon couldn’t be just a little more worried that his commanding officer was losing pints and it was his fault.

They got a lot of looks in the corridors on their way there. Ronon took them in stride and Sheppard avoided eye contact. Not because he was embarrassed – anyone who made fun of him was going to get an extra special training session with Ronon and see if they could get out of it with _their_ nose intact – but because he’d managed to smear blood upwards and it was getting into his eyes and kind of burning. 

Ronon walked Sheppard to the infirmary entrance, but as the doors opened he turned his body away like he was leaving.

“No you don’t,” Sheppard said, taking one hand off his face and wrapping it around Ronon’s bicep. “Get in here.”

Possibly Ronon couldn’t understand him, since it came out all nasally garbled and muffled or he was annoyed that there was now a giant bloody handprint on his arm, because he scowled.  But he probably understood that there was going to be yelling by the medical staff, and it was totally unfair to make Sheppard be the only target. He followed Sheppard inside, maybe mostly because Sheppard hadn’t let go of his arm and was pulling.

It didn’t take much time to attract attention.

“Oh, what the hell happened to you?” Keller said.

“Ronon punched me,” Sheppard said, aware it was probably incomprehensible since he had both hands cupped over his face again.

He didn’t know why she sounded so confused. He and Ronon were both dressed to workout and this wasn’t a wholly unusual outcome. Most of the time there was less blood, true.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a hard injury to fix. Keller flattened him on a gurney and poured saline solution or something over his face until she could see what she was dealing with. Then she made him sit up so she could shove a round plastic bottle up each nostril and depressing a button on the bottom. It produced a nasal spray that stung for a moment, making Sheppard try to jerk out of her hold.

“Gee, Ronon, what’d he do to make you mad?” She asked, looking at the palms of her red-coated gloves.

“He didn’t duck,” Ronon said, sounding like this was entirely Sheppard’s fault.

“You _could_ pull your punches,” Sheppard grumbled from around the gauze Keller had given him to hold against his nose. It was wet but not soaked, so whatever she’d done was already working.

“ _You_ could move faster,”Ronon retorted.

“Is it broken?” Sheppard asked Keller.

“Probably,” said Keller.

For a second, Ronon looked a little bit sorry.

She peered closer and poked it lightly with a finger, sending an intense bolt of pain through Sheppard’s face. “Doesn’t look displaced, though.”

What that meant, evidently, was that Keller wasn’t going to do anything about it except give him some ibuprofen and instructions to take care of it at home. This was probably better than surgery or her trying to touch it anymore, but it also meant that she lost any real interest in scolding Ronon.

Sheppard’s nose was swollen for a few days and sore for a lot longer than that. Worse, no one was sympathetic about it. Not even Teyla. Dicks.

“Maybe you shouldn’t spar with someone who thinks pain is fun,” McKay said, over dinner. “What if it ends up looking like that guy from that stupid plane movie you made us watch?”

“What guy?”

“Because there are multiple stupid plane movies,” McKay agreed. “Blonde. His nose looks like a crooked penis.”

Teyla did that stifled grin thing Sheppard was damn sure meant she wanted to crack up.

“I am sure that is unlikely,” she said, not really sounding reassuring so much as covertly obnoxious.

Ronon had the nerve to smirk. “That movie was cool,” was all he said.

“Would you like to suspend our own sparring schedule until that is healed?” Teyla asked, solicitously, waving fingers at his nose.

“No,” snapped Sheppard. “I’ll be fine. Just don’t hit me in the face.”

“Perhaps you should duck,” Teyla said.

More annoying was the goddamn thing kept bleeding. It didn’t hurt, it was just disgusting and irritating. It was kind of dangerous when it happened on missions. The natives that didn’t think it was just plain gross thought it was a symptom of some horrible illness or a supernatural warning that Sheppard’s team wasn’t to be trusted. The third time it almost got them put in prison, Rodney stopped making fun of him. Or at least, switched over from mocking him to complaining it was getting pointy spears shoved into his back.

Keller said there wasn’t much to be done about it. None of the Ancient medical tools were for nosebleeds, evidently. She gave him a homemade pharmaceutical mixture in a small tube to carry on missions, said to apply it frequently to the inside of his nostrils to keep it from drying out. Unfortunately, she gave it to him in front of his team, and he made the mistake of asking what it was.

“Nasal lubricant,” Keller said, totally innocent. 

“ _Lube_?” said McKay, and then he started chortling so hard it turned into snorting. Keller stared at him, forcing him to get the reaction under control before he looked like an even  bigger baby. Her presence meant he didn’t manage to say anything else for which Sheppard might have had to punch _him_ in the nose.

“Why is that funny?” Teyla asked, confused, and McKay tried to stifle a howl.  

Ronon cocked an eyebrow. Rodney got it together enough to make one universally known lewd hand gesture, and Ronon’s lips quirked.

“Thanks, Doc.” Sheppard said, shoving the tube into his pocket.

The corners of Keller’s mouth tugged down. “Sorry,” she said.

Other than McKay constantly asking Sheppard to make sure he brought his ‘nose lube,’ the cream actually helped a bit. Applying it was kind of painful, and on the downside it smelled funny.

He used it so often it was starting to affect the way things tasted. The MREs managed to be worse, if that was possible. But other things – food he actually liked – tasted weird too. He couldn’t even enjoy a single contraband beer because the first sip was suddenly horribly bitter. Sheppard found simple things like plain rice and pasta hadn’t changed, and those were generally the safest thing in the cafeteria, anyway.  On the upside, it also changed the flavor of stuff he hadn’t liked. Atlantis’ version of potato chips, which had always tasted like fried slices of a saltlick, were suddenly addictively palatable.

Unfortunately, a lot of missions required Sheppard to eat things that were incredibly gross to begin with, never mind the new twist his anti-crimson tide medication added. He usually relied on Teyla and Ronon to warn him if he was about to tuck into the Pegasus version of Puffer fish. While, mostly Teyla. Ronon was not a good judge of food safety. Or food, in general. Maybe it was seven years of eating earth worms and crickets, but Ronon pretty much liked anything he could chew.

He even liked the deep fried 10-foot-wide tarantula they had to eat at the ceremonial feast on M4X-812. Rodney bagged off because they couldn’t tell him what sauce it was cooked it – some kind of holy secret. And of course, the natives weren’t mortally offended because it was Sheppard that represented their ‘sacred friendship’ with Atlantis. Teyla never seemed to be horrified at these things. So, she usually made Sheppard look bad. Ronon, of course, ate two legs and was reaching for his third by the time Sheppard even picked up his fork.

“It good?” he asked Ronon.

“Yeah,” Ronon said, his mouth full.

Sheppard didn’t believe him, and two seconds later he confirmed that the damn thing tasted just as _hairy_ as it looked.

“Mmm,” Sheppard said to their hosts. “Interesting.” He tried not to gag.

“I find it very flavorful,” Teyla said, and smiled. Sheppard squinted at her, since she was either not lying or a much better liar than he’d thought.

Despite the fact that Sheppard only ate a quarter of a leg and covertly shoveled the rest of it onto Ronon’s plate, and Ronon ate possibly every leg the creature had and part of its…whatever the fuck the body of a spider was called…Sheppard was the only one that got sick.

He spent most of the night puking behind a bush. Sheppard tried to be quiet about it. Who knew what the natives would think about their sacred spidey dinner poisoning the guest of honor. For the sake of his team, he crawled a few meters away from their tents. He must not have been very stealthy about it, because Ronon immediately poked his head out of the tent flap, gun in hand.

“You okay?” he asked.

Sheppard really couldn’t answer for the next few minutes, but he guessed if Ronon was listening, he’d figure it out.

“Hrmf,” Sheppard said, when he could talk. “Fucking spider.” And then he threw up some more.

He could hear Ronon shuffling in place, probably debating whether or not he had to brave the prospect of vomit to check on Sheppard.

“What the hell is that?” came McKay’s voice, thick with sleep. “Someone have a hairball? Ronon?”

And that was kind of funny, but even thinking about laughing made Sheppard’s gut spasm and then he was heaving again.

“It’s Sheppard,” Ronon said.

“Oh.” And McKay didn’t sound very sympathetic. “At least he crawled downwind.”

“John?” That was Teyla, and she actually sounded concerned. At least one of his teammates liked him more than they disliked puke. She picked her way over to him in the darkness, carefully finding a clean spot to crouch beside him. “Are you alright?”

Sheppard figured he wasn’t dying, so he just nodded his head. Bless her, Teyla had brought her canteen. She unscrewed the top for him and held it down to his lips. His mouth tasted horrible and he gratefully opened up.

“Slowly,” Teyla suggested.

She was probably right, because he took a big gulp and his stomach revolted immediately.

Teyla leaned back, out of range, yanking the canteen out of the line of fire, too. Sheppard hoped he didn’t hit her, but he couldn’t really tell.

It turned out this was going to be one of those sessions where drinking water was going to make him puke more. Every time Teyla tried to even let him rinse his mouth out, it just started up again. It _sucked._ He could vaguely hear Ronon and McKay’s voices nearby, almost like they were watching with a running commentary. Neither one came to relieve Teyla, though. He kind of wished they would. He’d be far less embarrassed to puke on either one of them, might even enjoy the reaction.

As his stomach settled, Sheppard let his face drop into the flat, cool grass. It felt good, the rest of him miserably overheated.

He could hear McKay’s voice in the distance.

“… like Peter Parker does,” he said, and Ronon rumbled in response.

So, apparently the other half of his team was discussing whether or not he was transforming into a mutant superhero. That was fabulous.

Teyla was being annoyingly nice. She was rubbing his back in light circles, probably trying to make him feel better. It didn’t work. The pressure and the motion only made him want to retch some more. He was also _hot_ and soaked with sweat, and he really wanted to take off his shirt, but he didn’t want to be a half-naked puking guy around Teyla.

“G’way,” he said. And fortunately, she didn’t get that, because it was really rude. He propped himself up on his hands again.  “Get Ronon,” he managed, and that time she understood him.

She rose and shortly Ronon was at his side. Teyla stayed at a distance while Ronon stooped down.

“Want me to carry you?” Ronon asked. He was keeping his face a little pulled back, which probably meant Sheppard smelled pretty bad.

“No,” Sheppard said. He was too exhausted to do anything but flap his arms a little and pull on his sleeves. “Hot,” he said.

Ronon understood, even if he didn’t look too thrilled about trying to get Sheppard’s gross shirt off. But he did it, anyway, gingerly but effectively. And he wasn’t too nice about it like Teyla would have been, or squeamish and loud about it like Rodney would have been. The air was wonderfully cool against Sheppard’s damp skin and he hadn’t thrown up in a few minutes. He was too tired to stay propped up anymore, found a clear spot in the grass, and flopped himself down.

A few minutes later he was vaguely aware that Ronon was grabbing him by the shoulders and trying to get his arms under Sheppard’s body. This was probably the set up to getting carried through the ‘Gate, half-naked and covered in puke. Only slightly better than totally naked and covered in shit.

Ronon hefted him up, the motion jarring enough that Sheppard’s gut surged again and he tensed up.

“I can walk,” he said, somewhere near Ronon’s ear. The man could literally carry him like a baby with total ease. It was so unfair.

“No, you can’t,” Ronon said, and they were already moving. Sheppard started wiggling. Not really struggling, since he couldn’t really manage that. But wiggling was enough and Ronon got annoyed. “Stop it,” he said, grip tightening. If he kept that up, Sheppard was going to throw up on him.

“Carry me to the ‘Gate,” Sheppard said. “Lemme walk through.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ronon said, but it didn’t sound like he really believed that was going to  happen.

Teyla and McKay stayed behind to conclude their trading pact. Sheppard presumed they wouldn’t mention to their hosts why the team leader had absconded in the night.

Ronon did let him walk through the ‘Gate on his own. It might have involved mostly staggering and leaning heavily on him, but it still counted. He face-planted on to a gurney as soon as it showed up, didn’t even bother cooperating much as Keller tried to get him to roll over so she could get an IV in.

It turned out it maybe wasn’t the arachnid entrée, but the plain old Earth flu, courtesy of contagious interlopers from the Daedalus. It happened every goddamn time the ship visited, and Sheppard was only the first one to go down.

McKay didn’t get it. Not for real, though he showed up in the infirmary to complain about imaginary symptoms once or twice. McKay _never_ got the various illnesses the Daedalus always brought. It was like his hypochondria actually bolstered his immune system. It was so fucking unfair.

Teyla and Ronon both got it. Maybe worse than everyone else, though by this point they’d each had it before. The doctors on the Daedalus sucked at isolating contagious patients or the crew were compulsive liars. One of these days they were going to bring goddamn smallpox or the bubonic plague to Pegasus. Sheppard had complained about it before. Maybe this time he’d go vomit _on_ Caldwell, see if that got the message across.

Getting it first had some benefits. By the time everyone else was upchucking all over the place, Sheppard was strolling around the infirmary without an IV stand. He still had vague nausea and mild body aches, but he was keeping light meals down.

Keller got it, too. She turned a really interesting shade of green and still refused to go off duty. Apparently, she was allowed to do that. It meant she also didn’t really have the energy to fight him when he declared himself ready to go home. Sheppard figured he could lie around and feel miserable just as well in his own quarters. The only reason they’d kept him so long was because he gotten sick offworld, and because there was some kind of underground betting pool on how many days per month he spent hospitalized and the nurses were in on it.

Unfortunately, he didn’t get to lie around his quarters. Ronon heard he was up and around and wanted to spar. Somewhere, maybe in the near decade of totally lacking access to medical care, Ronon had decided that violence made him feel better. Sheppard had tried to explain that for normal humans it didn’t work that way, that illness made them fragile and slow, not faster and meaner.

Ronon didn’t really care, though, and Sheppard had been pretty bored in the infirmary, anyway. He extracted a general promise to avoid his still tender nose, and warned him that if Ronon flattened him, there was no guarantee Sheppard could get back up.

Afterwards, at lunch in the cafeteria, Sheppard mused that Ronon’s philosophy had some merit. It was hard to be unhappy about having the flu and resentful about still having to eat broth when he was also wondering if his spine was permanently twisted into a Satedan pretzel. Enough people were sick that the cafeteria was actually offering broth as the primary meal, but Ronon was eating a hamburger. The only thing that made Sheppard feel better about that was that it was a crappy non-cow Pegasus hamburger.

McKay showed up later, when Sheppard was pathetically scraping the last of his broth up with a spoon. He was wearing a surgical mask over his face.

“Stylin’, Rodney,” Sheppard said.

“I’m not covered in my own puke,” McKay said, setting his tray opposite Sheppard’s. “And I get to eat solid food.”

“Where’s Teyla?” asked Ronon, since she was the only one missing.

“In her quarters,” McKay said. “She gets really cranky when she’s sick, you know.”

Sheppard didn’t think that was true. Healthy Teyla was just unusually pleasant and tolerant, so it was kind of strange to be around her when she was too tired and unhappy to be polite.

Before he left, McKay went back up to the serving line and came back holding a tray with a bowl of broth. Usually, he used his second time through for extra pudding.

“I thought you got to eat solid food,” Sheppard said.

“This is for Carter,” McKay said, sticking his chin out. “She crashed this morning.”

“Oh,” said Sheppard.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get her puke germs?” asked Ronon.

“There is nothing in this galaxy or any other that Rodney wants more than her puke germs,” said Sheppard.

“I’m being nice,” snapped Rodney. “She doesn’t want to move, she needs to stay hydrated. I don’t have an ulterior motive.”

“Right,” said Sheppard. “Next time bring _me_ broth!” he yelled at McKay’s stiff, retreating back. 

~


	2. Uncertain Thing 2/5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of medical issues threatens Sheppard's place on the team.

Sparring with Ronon while getting over the flu probably hadn’t been his brightest idea, ever. Sheppard didn’t remember the hit, but Ronon must have nailed him in the kidneys at some point. His lower back was tender and aching, so much so that Sheppard was icing it at night if he was on Atlantis and in some serious discomfort if he was offworld and didn’t want to get the others’ attention by digging a cold pack out of the medkit. Which he didn’t, since Teyla would suggest he see a doctor and also probably tell on him to Keller, McKay would mock him some more, and Ronon wouldn’t say anything, just look at him in a way that said _dude, you really can’t take a hit, can you?_

On top of that, the nosebleeds continued. Those, he did ask Keller about. It was ridiculous, annoying, and totally disgusting. McKay had become pretty desensitized to them, such that he no longer jumped away and didn’t come back ‘til it was over. Instead, he reacted the way he did to anything that inconvenienced him but wasn’t an urgent danger, so that was extra fun.

“You know,” McKay said during one such incident, when he and Sheppard were hiding in some kind of palace janitorial closet, waiting for the red tide to stop while Teyla and Ronon politely stalled the prince they were supposed to be meeting. “On the X-files, when Scully got a nosebleed, it was ‘cause she had brain cancer.”

Sheppard threw a dirty sponge in the general direction of McKay’s face, but he missed.

He went back to Keller – _not_ because of that comment – and demanded she make it stop.

“I think you’ve just really irritated your nasal mucosa,” Keller said, apologetically.

When he squinted at her, she raised her eyebrows and translated: “Inside of your nose. Its blood vessels are popping.”

She gave him another dispenser – saline spray, this time –  to stick up there and promised to put in an order for a humidifier for his quarters the next time the Daedalus swung by.

“Can you order an ENT doc, too?” he asked.

“I can,” Keller said, easily. She wasn’t offended. “It’s unlikely he’d say anything different.”

“This _sucks_ ,” he said.

“Take some iron pills,” was the last thing she told him. “You could get anemic.”

Sheppard wondered if that explained why his back still hurt, decided to take her up on it. He’d forgotten to mention the first nasal spray was fucking with his tastebuds. Running back to whine about that seemed mostly pointless, so he’d do it next time.

Unfortunately, next time proved to be sooner than he’d expected. And it was something he really couldn’t deal with himself or put off dealing with, and it also fucking sucked.

He walked into the infirmary at 0630, rapped on the door of Keller’s office so she’d know he was there, then made a beeline to the nearest examination room and was stripped down to his boxers by the time she’d gathered a chart and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he said.

Keller entered, cast an eye at his state of undress, and promptly waved the door shut.

“I take it this isn’t about your nose,” she said.

Sheppard had his arms crossed in front of his chest. “It burns when I pee,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. They had to learn how to keep that blank, emotionless face in med school. She didn’t react at all, only flipping open his chart to scribble something down. “When did it start?”

“This morning.” He said. “But it was pretty distinct.”

“I bet,” Keller said. She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You done this before?”

“I don’t suppose there’s some kind of Ancient device you can use that doesn’t involve sticking anything up my urethra?"

Keller smiled, but it was a sad, wrong smile. “Afraid not.”

Sheppard ducked his head, nodded. “Course not.”

“I’m also going to need a urine sample,” she said, going back to serious.

“I know,” Sheppard said. “I don’t mind that part.”

“I’ll get some supplies,” Keller said. She laid her chart on the exam table and purposefully flipped it open to a blank page. “In the meantime, if you want to write down the names of anyone else who’s going to need to come in, as well…”

Sheppard glared. “You aren’t allowed to ask that.”

“In the interest of public health,” Keller said, “I am. It doesn’t get written down anywhere official and I’m the only one who ever knows.”

He didn’t move. “Let’s wait ‘til there’s something to tell, yeah?”

Keller put her hands up in surrender. “Fine.”

Then, she vanished from the room to go find the spear she was going to shove up his dick. Sheppard stared after her and tried really hard not to hate her.

In as much as they lacked a civilized way of doing the test, Keller’s equipment analyzed the swab and urine sample instantaneously. He didn’t even have to leave the infirmary before she was back with the results.

“You don’t have an STI,” she said, as soon as the door shut.

Sheppard made a fist of victory and pumped it lightly against his chest. Keller’s eyebrows danced in amusement.

“I had a roommate at the Academy who had a “It’s-not-gonorrhea” happy dance,” he said, defensively. Her eyebrows moved some more. “ _Roommate_ ,” he repeated. “Not me.” He paused. “So what _do_ I have?”

“Bacterial infection,” she said. “of your urinary tract. Practically identical to gonorrhea in terms of symptoms.”

“Fantastic,” Sheppard said, and scowled. “Never had that before.” He paused for a second. “I thought only chicks got UTI’s.”

“It’s very rare for men under 50,” she admitted. “But it’s more common in patients that are frequently catheterized.”

“Ah,” Sheppard said. It was nice that that uniquely unpleasant experience had equally unpleasant side effects.  

“But it’s totally treatable,” Keller said, trying to sound cheerful. “Antibiotics. It doesn’t work instantaneously, though, so you’ll probably want to stick around the city for a few days.”

“Okay,” Sheppard said. He hesitated, running things over in his mind. “Ronon nailed me in the kidneys a while ago,” he said. “That kind of thing help?”

“Probably not,” Keller said. She looked concerned. “You should have come in.”

He shrugged. He was here now.  “It was just a backache.” Which he still had.

“That’s a UTI symptom, too,” Keller informed him.

“Oh.” That made sense. He sighed. “Is impotence?”

“Impotence?” Keller echoed. Surprise crossed her face. “No.”

“Just thought I’d ask,” he said.

But Keller was dropping to a seat on her stool, seasoned coolness on her face. And here came the conversation he’d dreaded.

“That’s been a problem?” she asked.

He hadn’t asked for fun, so he nodded.

“Painful ejaculation?” Keller asked.

“Ow. And _ew._ ” he said. That sounded horrible. “No, doesn’t get that far.” he said. “Just…failure to achieve fullness.”

“Okay,” Keller said. Except it was not at all okay. “Is this unusual?”

Sheppard looked at her. He knew she was trying to be professional, but having a chick ask him that was never, ever not going to trigger manly defensiveness. “Yes,” he said, emphatically.

“Have you been under stress lately?” she asked, next. The moment the words left her lips she seemed to realize how dumb that question was.

“Do you remember what my job is?” he retorted, and she looked sheepish. “No more than usual,” he said, more genuinely. “Except lacking my favorite avenue of _stress relief_.” He waved his hand towards his crotch, managing not make any kind of more specific masturbation gesture but feeling his cheeks flush, anyway.

Keller ignored it, thankfully. “When was your last physical?” she asked, instead.

And she was changing the subject, which was nice of her, except it was to something he also wasn’t a big fan of.

“I’m in here _all the time_.”

He’d already looked up the primary causes of impotence. Mostly out of boredom and frustration, since he already knew. Unless he had end stage prostate cancer – unlikely –  she wasn’t going to find anything. The stupid Atlantis internet last cached version of google said it was all in his head. He just figured his dick was catching up with his broken nose, the goddamn flu, and Ronon whaling on his kidneys. Great timing.

But Keller was already looking at his chart and ascertaining, of course, that it had been too long. He scowled and eyed the door. Except he was still undressed and running out of infirmary in his boxers with Keller chasing him wasn’t going to be inconspicuous. She probably just wanted to stick her fingers up his ass without having to specifically ask, because he would so not be volunteering for that.

Running away wasn’t actually an option, and Keller disagreed with him when he told her he got a goddamn prostate exam every time he came in for trauma.

“What?” she said. “No. Ohh. They’re checking sphincter tonicity.”

He blinked at her.

“It’s indicative of spinal cord injuries,” she explained.

“Oh,” Sheppard said. Then, “Feels the same.”

That argument didn’t work, not that he expected it to. She did the whole shebang, anyway. Finger in the butt down to a whole half hour in the stupid coffin-like full body scanner, and enough test tubes of his blood that he felt kind of faint. This time, when she was done, he did actually run away. In fairness, she said he could stick around and wait for all the results, or he could go. So, he went.

He ended up in McKay’s lab, mostly out of the lack of anywhere else to go. If anything, he knew the bathroom had a good supply of reading material he could use while pretending he was doing anything but experiencing the frequent and urgent need to piss fire, because he had a stupid girly disease in addition to a broken dick. Keller had given him a bottle of antibiotics but warned him that was probably how he was going to spend the rest of his day.

It turned out he was going to get a free show, because McKay and Zelenka were fighting about something. These were usually pretty entertaining, barring the fact that they were also usually about topics concerning imminent death of some kind.

“What’s up?” Sheppard asked as he strolled in.

“What are you doing here?” McKay asked, at the same that Zelenka said, “McKay broke city again.”

“I did not,” McKay howled, immediately. Except Sheppard figured he knew he was more responsible for whatever the problem was, since he hadn’t taken the opportunity to accuse Zelenka of it first.

“What happened?” Sheppard asked.

“Section Delta seventeen,” Zelenka said. “Level four. Life support gone.”

“Life support _off_ ,” McKay corrected. “Off, temporarily.”

“McKay deleted the system,” Zelenka continued. “Life support gone.”

“I did not delete the system,” McKay said. “Because that is not possible!” Softer, “Because it shouldn’t be possible, because no one in their right mind would make it possible, nevertheless that easy and simple –  without any security measures – to delete a basic and vital subprotocol.”

“Hold it,” said Sheppard. “That building’s evacuated, right?”

“Of course,” said McKay.

“Yes,” said Zelenka. Then, “Is possible, Rodney, because you _did_ it.”

“Well, I will fix it just as soon as you stop harassing me.” To Sheppard, “What’d you want?”

“I just came to say hi,” Sheppard said. “But it really sounds like you should get on that.”

McKay made a dismissive face. “It’s not _that_ big a deal. We’re not in space, so it’s mostly just kind of cold and lacking in oxygen right now.”

“Not big deal at all,” muttered Zelenka. “Very small deal. Insignificant, really. No air to breathe, no problem.”

McKay was about to go off again, but suddenly there were a lot more people in the lab and the volume died in his throat. “Huh?”

It was a squad of Marines and they were angling towards Sheppard.

“Sir!” The lieutenant was Jacobson or Johannson or someone. “Dr. Keller needs you in the infirmary immediately.”

“She sent all of you?” Sheppard said. It wasn’t like he’d come running, but neither would he have not come.

And two of the Marines were closing on him, making grabby hands at his arms as if to _take him into custody._ Almost involuntarily, Sheppard jerked out of their reach, because what the fuck?

“Immediately,” the lieutenant repeated. “Medical emergency.”

“What’d you -” McKay began to say to Sheppard, who couldn’t answer because the Marines were grabbing him for real.

The lieutenant raised a hand to his earpiece. Then, “Dr. McKay, too. Just in case.”

“What?” McKay demanded. Then, “Hey!” because he was being grabbed, too.

It felt like seconds, it was probably a few minutes. As much as Sheppard liked to mock the Marines – which he did, a lot, because he was _Air Force_ and recruited for his brains as much as his brawn – when they wanted to move someone they did it efficiently and quickly and even though he wasn’t trying to stop them it was kind of annoying to know that he couldn’t even if he wanted to. And then he was alone in one of the isolation rooms. Rodney had been hustled on to the infirmary itself, protesting the whole way.

Sheppard looked up at the opaque glass in the observation window, having no idea what was going on and honestly kind of freaked.

~

It took a while for Keller to come see him. In the meantime, Sheppard had plenty of time to think about worst case scenarios. Previous to joining the Stargate program, his thoughts would have mostly been about cancer or herpes or his dick falling off. Now, though, his mind automatically went other places. Like turning-into-a-bug places. Alien microbes melting his internal organs. A snake burrowing in to his skull. Evil Pegasus germs making his dick fall off. Shit like that.

He also got a nosebleed while he was waiting. Isolation was a pretty barren place. Most of the time people in there were raving mad and tied to the gurney. Sometimes they got loose and grabbed things. Or, alternately, patients were infectious as hell and it was empty for contamination reasons. So, not much lying around, not even tissues. Sheppard took a moment to appreciate the fact that even if he’d practically been carried there by Marines, he wasn’t tied down.  That kind of left the other option – infectious as hell – on the table. But he’d been inches away from Zelenka and the Marines had left him in McKay’s lab with his arms initially raised in panicked surrender and then oddly sort of waving goodbye as Sheppard and McKay were hauled away.

Sheppard pulled the sheet off of the gurney and used it to wipe up the blood. It made a big mess and looked gross, but Keller was taking too long for him to feel particularly bad about it. He looked at the bright red droplets on the white fabric, felt something twist nervously within him. But he’d been seen for that, repeatedly. Keller had known from day one. She’d even shoved his head in a scanner to make sure…to make sure…for some reason. It was totally mundane. It was from getting punched in the face.

But he still balled up the bloody sheet and threw it violently across the room, which wasn’t very satisfying since it unfurled itself in the air and fluttered lightly to the floor.

He was sitting on the edge of the gurney, examining the blood dried under his fingernails and feeling the urgent need to wash his hands and the greater need to just hop in the shower and scrub away the tense, uncomfortable sensation that had settled across his skin when Keller finally showed up.

She had a surgical mask over her face, but she wasn’t decked out in a full biohazard contamination suit. As she entered, Sheppard could see the torso of a guard stationed right outside the door over her shoulder. That was interesting. Maybe he was a combination of dangerous and infectious. Her arms were full: in addition to a laptop in her hands she had his chart and a portable scanner under her arm.

He didn’t move from his seat.

“Doc, what the hell’s going on?” he asked, and his voice sounded a little harsher and freaked than he’d intended.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to get to you,” Keller said. Her eyes were big and round above her mask. Sheppard’s stomach turned heavy in his gut. “I wanted the rest of your team evaluated.”

“Are they okay?” Sheppard asked.

Keller nodded. “Yeah.”

“And I’m not?”

“I found something on your body scan,” she said. Keller was trying to set the laptop down on the center of the gurney without dropping everything she was holding.

“Something?” Sheppard helped her set it down, shoving the chart and the scanner aside. “What something?”

The screen was in powersave mode, empty and dark. It came alive with a flick of Keller’s finger on the data pad. Sheppard recognized the image as the outline of a human form, the layers of flesh, muscle, and bone represented by various textured and translucent colors. It was his body, he supposed, even if it looked like a computerized drawing of any human being. Keller was zooming in on the torso, eliminating depicted layers with various keystrokes. His muscles vanished, followed by his skeleton and the highway of veins and arteries that marked every limb. All that remained were the organs. He could identify his heart – which looked nice and big and normal to his untrained eyes – and his lungs, everything else a tightly packed mass of multi-colored puzzle piece stuffing. Keller made those go away, too, ‘til all that was left in the human outline on screen was something that was most definitely not supposed to be there.

“What the fuck is that?” said Sheppard.

It was round – mostly round, but kind of amorphous – and centered in his abdomen. Sheppard’s hand shot to his stomach, as if he could feel it. It looked big, on screen. But it was more than a pink colored glob. On screen, it represented the way his circulatory system had: tendrils flowing out, branching up to his chest and down to his pelvis.

“Parasite,” Keller said, sounding not at all as horrified as she should have. “I think.”

Involuntarily, Sheppard pressed in with the hand resting on his gut. He expected sudden, solid resistance, but it didn’t feel any different.

Swiftly, Keller pried his fingers up and away. “Don’t do that,” she said.

“Cut it out,” Sheppard said, letting her pull his hand away. “Get it out of me!”

“I will,” Keller promised. “There is a surgical team already scheduled. But we have to know what we’re dealing with, first.”

She made a gesture behind her head with two fingers, apparently the signal for nearly every other member of the medical staff to enter, bringing with them every piece of equipment that wasn’t nailed down. He appreciated that she’d spoken to him alone, first. But it didn’t make him any less tense and furtively terrified as two nurses quickly undressed him, completely, with all eyes in the room glued to his exposed abdomen.

They shaved his belly immediately. His belly and most of his pubes, and that process would have been utterly humiliating with so many people in the room paying such close attention, except that a certain scene from _Alien_ was playing non-stop behind his eyes and was an excellent and horrible distraction.

He must have looked like he was wigging out, because Keller asked him if he wanted a sedative. Sheppard said no, because hell no, but he couldn’t be sure that she didn’t give him one anyway because suddenly there was an IV in his wrist and it was a lot harder to pay attention to everything that was happening.

They didn’t take him into surgery immediately. Alice Stockly, a Jamaican nurse whose accent he’d always found mostly incomprehensible, sat by the IV stand and kept promising it would happen soon. But the rest of the medical staff continued to stare at the laptop screen and talk over one another.

He had a hard time listening, probably because he’d been doped. What he did overhear was mostly medical jargon that didn’t make a whole of sense. The words he did recognize were all bad. It was hard to keep track, too, because someone new was constantly coming over with a different scanner and looking at it with a face that was either baffled or worried or, more upsetting, actually excited. 

“Open him up,” he heard over the other voices. It was one of the combat surgeons, Poldolski. “Is only way to really see,” he added in his thick Polish accent. Sheppard normally liked that guy– he’d once removed a really pointy spear from Sheppard’s gut without so much as breaking a sweat. But he sounded uncertain and rushed, so out of character he made Sheppard even less happy.

But Poldolski must have won out, because shortly more equipment was being brought into the room – surgical equipment. They were bringing the OR into Isolation rather than wheeling him out. People were emptying out of the room, and if they came back they were gowned up completely. It was harder to recognize individuals, every one in identical scrubs with all but their eyes covered. Alice came back, identifiable with her accent and the fact that he couldn’t understand a word she was saying but assumed it was supposed to be comforting. He found Keller, next, standing over him with Poldolski on the other side. There was a tray of instruments being set up by his head and next to it he recognized another of anesthetic equipment.

“Everything’s going to be fine, Colonel,” Keller said.

But it was around then, as the mask was coming down over his face to send him into oblivion, that Sheppard noticed that among all the sterile, surgical gowns surrounding him, there were two really large, hulking guys standing on the other side of the room. They were far too big and loitering far too uselessly to be any of the medical staff and he could see the distinct lumps of their service weapons under the gowns. They’d seen _Alien_ , too. It made the breath catch in his throat, even as the sweet and oppressive odor filled his lungs.

“Count backwards for me,” Keller said, lifting the mask away.

“I want it in a specimen jar when you get it out,” he said, blearily. “So I can put it on my mantle and name it Bob.”

Keller’s eyes crinkled above her mask, and that was the last thing he saw before his vision fuzzed out completely.

~


	3. Uncertain Thing 3/5

They didn’t get it out.

It was still inside of him.

Keller told him, immediately, the moment he woke up. The sentence penetrated the fog on anesthesia, as did the dull and distance ache of his midsection. Sheppard caught parts of the explanation – the words ‘compromised,’ ‘unstable,’ ‘failure,’ and ‘unlikely to survive’ in that order before he fell back into the fuzzy grayness.

Later, when he was fully awake and the incision that ran from his groin to the bottom of his ribcage was stinging angrily and loudly despite the pain meds, Keller explained again why they’d sliced him open and left it there.

She was trying very, very hard not to scare him. The effort was visible, if not successful. She was also having trouble putting it into words he could understand, maybe because of the first thing.

What she got across was still incredibly scary. The wispy pink tendrils on the scanner were thick, solid, and blood-infused purple in real life. And they were entwined with parts he’d like to keep. Parts he had to keep: liver, pancreas, kidneys, endocrinal and respiratory systems.

They’d excised a tiny segment and he’d hemorrhaged so badly they’d given him four transfusions.

“You scared us,” Keller said, with a tiny smile of relief.

“Sorry,” Sheppard muttered. He couldn’t summon any energy to play that game.

“McKay donated some blood for you,” Keller continued.

“Really?” He almost laughed, felt the burn in his abdomen at the slightest tense, and had to stifle the urge.

“He’s not a match,” said Keller. “But it made him feel useful and he was driving the staff insane, and they got to stab him. Everyone’s happy.”

Sheppard jerked one cheek up. But she was just distracting him from the real issue. With effort he raised one hand and fluttered it at his stomach. “What’s the story?” he asked, still too weak to speak very strongly.

Keller’s face went serious. “Attempting to remove it would have killed you, Colonel.”

“Can’t leave it,” he said, tiredly. There was a whole lot more to say than that. He was too overwhelmed to manage it. This was horrifying.

“No.” Keller found his arm and patted it. “We will get that thing out of you, John, I promise.

But she didn’t tell him any great plan, meaning there probably wasn’t one. Instead she wanted to talk about recovery from abdominal surgery. He’d heard this speech before, and it was a lot easier to take when the surgery had done something _good_ , like remove a bullet or a spear or a diseased appendix. It was too much to listen to, with his stomach throbbing and his brain swimming with all the horrible implications she wasn’t talking about, so Sheppard just checked out.

They wouldn’t let him leave Isolation. All the typical post-op shit sucked even more, confined to that small room with the observation window peering down on him. There weren’t any complications – besides the fucking gigantic fucking alien fucking parasite making itself at home in Sheppard’s belly. He considered that a huge, yes, _fucking_ complication.

The medical staff was keeping something from him. Sheppard figured that out almost immediately. At first he thought it was the effort to translate medical jargon into plain English without frightening him. They should just give that up. There wasn’t any way to talk about the thing inside of him without being upsetting. Sheppard was trying to react to everything calmly and rationally. He thought he had to right to flip the fuck out, even if it wasn’t very productive. Still, he tried to keep it to a minimum.

He didn’t think the secret was his slim chance of survival. That was kind of out in the open, as far as he was concerned. An alien organism had a death grip on his vital organs and he’d nearly bled to death when they’d nicked it. That made the end game scenario pretty obvious, he thought. But no one had tried to have that conversation with him yet. None of the nurses had asked if he wanted to update his posthumous instructions or anything. If he did, it would be to take the goddamn _thing_ out of his remains and burn it. Biology could have a slide or two for samples, but the rest of it needed to be destroyed as violently as possible.

One thing Keller did want to talk about was that most of his recent health problems were explained.

“Your blood pressure’s elevated,” she said. “To support _it._ ”

No one was really sure what to call it. Sheppard preferred a lengthy string of obscenity, but he generally went with ‘thing’. A lot of the staff stuck to ‘organism’, which didn’t really communicate the full picture. Keller liked to avoid naming it at all.

“Increased blood flow,” Keller explained. “Blood vessels expand and rupture. Nosebleeds.”

“Oh,” Sheppard said. “I liked it better when it was Ronon’s fault.”

“I did notice the change in blood pressure,” Keller said. She sounded guilty. “But it wasn’t dangerous.”

 Sheppard didn’t blame her. He hadn’t had a full body scan in nearly five months. It was the only procedure that would have caught this any earlier. That wasn’t Keller’s fault. Also, Sheppard remembered twice – _at least_ twice – running out of the infirmary before submitting to that part of the exam. Off to report on the mission at hand, or just because being in the infirmary sucked. He’d never come back. So really, this was all on him.

If Sheppard didn’t have enough reasons to hate the thing living inside him, it’d also broken his dick.  This was a little less straight forward. Keller said it was diverting blood flow – which made sense – and fucking with his hormone levels. The UTI and the persistent backache were probably also to blame on it. Sheppard felt even dumber. He should have come in with it. Hell, Ronon might not even have hit him there at all.

He finally got around to mentioning the fact that his taste buds have been fucked up for a while, too.

“I thought it was the stuff you gave me for the nosebleeds,” he said.

Keller shook her head. “No,” she said.

“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “Guess not.”

She didn’t scold him for not reporting that symptom. In fact, she hadn’t fussed at him at all, beyond enforcing all the protocols now in place to monitor him. Course, yelling at your dying patient for getting himself into this condition was probably discouraged.

Unsurprisingly, he’d gained weight. Eleven fucking pounds of evil alien parasite and its supporting structure.

“Thought I’d lost some,” he admitted. “From the flu.”

“Weight’s not something we pay much attention to,” Keller said, and she was probably trying to shoulder more blame. “You’re a healthy guy. We should have noted it.”

They didn’t let him look at his abdomen much. The incision was all bandaged up and the nurses were very swift when they came to clean it and change the gauze. It really didn’t look different, when he did see it. Maybe a little heavier, but nothing he wouldn’t have otherwise attributed to stealing a few too many pudding cups from Rodney.

It’s unnerving to be analyzing himself for signs of the parasite’s presence. The medical staff wasn’t asking him to, maybe aware that it’s already driving him insane. He’s not sure what good it did, but they collected his urine and stool daily, along with a test tube of blood per day.

It’s this kind of intense treatment that usually drove him up the wall, made him plot escape. Usually, though, it was over within a few days of post-op, when they’re assured his organs were all back doing what they’re supposed to do. Now, it was unending. He was still pretty sure there was something they weren’t telling him. He went back and forth on that, unsure if he was suspicious because there were reasonable grounds, or suspicious because he was angry that they couldn’t fix it. The pain didn’t help. His incision stung and Keller wouldn’t up his pain meds. The main thing was how much they were excluding him from the process. He hadn’t been shown what the thing inside of him looked like in any more detail than the body scan. No one talked to him about their plan to make it dead.

Carter dropped by to visit him. He’d seen her blonde head a couple of times in the observation window, when they forgot to opaque the glass. That was another annoying thing. He could see the staff having meetings about him, and they usually didn’t bother to pretend they weren’t all watching him.

“We’re going to get you out of this,” she reassured him. “Best minds in the galaxy at work here.”

She actually didn’t look particularly worried. He wondered if she was immune to fearing the words ‘parasite’ after dealing with the goa’uld threat for so long. Or if she had a respectable fear precisely for that reason, and this was her brave little toaster face.

And that’s really the last place his mind needed to go. He still saw guards outside the door. It was just protocol, but he figured they hadn’t completely ruled out the idea that the thing inside him was going to come alive, take control of his body, and go on an evil parasite rampage. Or maybe they had. Either way, they weren’t telling him. Everyone except the most jumpy scientists had stopped wearing surgical masks around him. At the very least, they didn’t think it was an airborne contagion.

About a week and a half into his stay in Isolation, Keller asked him if he felt up to visitors.

“Your team wants to see you,” she said.

“They know what happened?” he asked.

“The entire city has been told that you’ve been placed in Isolation due to exposure to an alien substance,” Keller said, carefully. “They know that you had surgery and are stable and quarantined for the time being.”

He imagined the gossip mill had him turning into a bug again. No one would guess the so-called alien substance was making itself at home in his abdominal cavity.

“Rodney has been harassing my people,” Keller continued. She cleared her throat pointedly. “Trying to find out the details. One of my staff requisitioned a tranquilizer gun loaded with Ketamine to deal with him.”

Sheppard couldn’t stop the grin that produced. “If you could get that on tape,” he said. “It’d make being stuck in here a lot more bearable.”

Keller smiled, pleased her attempt at humor had worked.

“You want to see them?” she continued.

Sheppard nodded. “Could you maybe…” he paused and made a meaningless gesture with his left hand.

“I’ll tell them,” Keller said, understanding the half-assed jazz hands for what it was. “I will explain it as best I can.”

“Thanks.” He wondered if that made him kind of cowardly, but at the same time figured it was probably better for everyone if they heard a clinical explanation and not “Guys, there’s an alien motherfucker living in my ribcage, and I’m probably gonna die.” Well, he might still say that, mostly for Ronon’s ears. The man appreciated candor. 

“Be realistic,” he told Keller as she went to leave. That made the doctor stop, almost stumble, on her way out. She nodded sincerely and left the room.

~

Sheppard hadn’t really anticipated how freaked his team was. The three of them came barreling after Keller. Ronon made no bones about getting around her so he could walk to the side of Sheppard’s bed, and Teyla fairly sprinted after him. Sheppard wasn’t sure, but it also kind of looked like Ronon had belted the guard at the door on his way in. That was probably undeserved. McKay was last, skittering in the doorway and not looking really happy that it shut behind him.

“Hey, guys,” Sheppard said. He was stretched out on the gurney, propped into a sitting position. It might have made him look more debilitated than he actually was, but it was comfy.

“Sheppard,” said Ronon, moving to his right.

“John,” said Teyla, taking his left side. She actually sounded deeply worried, and she was leaning over him.

“Major abdominal surgery,” Keller said, quietly from the doorway. “No hugs.”

Athosians didn’t do hugs, though, they did the head bump thing that Sheppard thought was really much cooler. And he didn’t think Teyla had pulled him into one of those in _years_ , but she was doing it now, leaning carefully in and bringing her forehead against his. Teyla’s skin was warm and she smelled nice, but Sheppard didn’t get a chance to enjoy it for long because shortly she was withdrawing her hands from his shoulders and getting out of the way so that Ronon could move in and _try to squish his head_.

“Ah!” Sheppard squawked, because Ronon’s solid arms were folded around his neck and the big guy was squeezing. “Leggo!”

Keller made a noise that sounded more like amusement than disapproval. Ronon didn’t hold on for long, letting Sheppard shove his arms off.

“Nice to see you, too,” Sheppard grumbled, once he was free.

McKay hadn’t moved beyond the foot of Sheppard’s bed, where he was standing with his arms crossed.

“I’m not going to hug you,” he said.

Sheppard resettled himself on the gurney and shot Ronon an annoyed look, which naturally had no real effect.

“Good,” he said to McKay. “Thanks.”

“How are you feeling?” Teyla asked.

“Good,” Sheppard said. “I’m good.”  He saw Keller discreetly step outside and shut the door. He abruptly changed his answer. “Full of rage and alien parasite, but otherwise, I’m good.”

Ronon was looking at him, but not at his face. Instead, he was intently studying Sheppard’s midsection, concealed as it was by the gurney sheet.

“You can’t see it,” he said, trying to sound relaxed but suspecting he wasn’t quite pulling it off. “You can’t tell. _I_ couldn’t tell. I don’t feel it.”

“They can’t kill it?” Ronon asked, in a tone that made Sheppard almost defensively fold his arms over his abs. Like Ronon would like the opportunity to try.

“Not without killing me too, buddy,” he said. “They’re working on it.”

The faces of his friends were horribly grim. Ronon looked murderous. Teyla was visibly upset. Rodney was just standing at the end of the bed, frowning and worst of all staying uncharacteristically silent. Keller had probably threatened him to some degree, but still.

Sheppard put a hand up, rubbed the back of his neck. “Can we talk about something else, please?” No one said anything. “What’s new with you guys?” he continued, awkwardly. “What have I missed?”

Ronon and Rodney just wanted to scowl and pout, respectively, so it was a good thing that Teyla was there. She took a deep breath, forced a smile on to her face, and tried to change the subject.

Unfortunately, what Teyla had been up to during Sheppard’s time in Isolation was pretty damn boring. Hanging out with her people, particularly an especially boring Athosian dude named Kanaan and planting flowers or something. It wasn’t much to make a new conversation.

Teyla seemed to know that. She frowned. “We were very worried about you,” she said, apologetically. Then, she looked sharply at Ronon.

Compelling Ronon to speak with a mere glance was a new and impressive skill.

“I broke a guy’s cheek,” Ronon said, more a declaration than an answer.

“Yeah?” Sheppard asked. Ronon ducked his chin down in affirmation. “Bad guy or one of ours?”

Ronon didn’t answer.

“Lieutenant Rudler,” Teyla supplied, her tone implying that Rudler had deserved it for some reason.

“Oh,” Sheppard said. Ronon probably shouldn’t confess to deliberately injuring anyone with unknown numbers of medical staff standing behind the opaqued window of the observation room. “Good to know you miss me.”

Ronon had been having a more interesting time than Teyla. Or Sheppard for that matter. In between breaking the faces of various Atlantis members that offended him, he’d gone on a hostage negotiation mission with Lorne’s team. That sounded like a horrible idea to Sheppard, but they’d brought back their two kidnapped botanists alive without killing any natives. Scaring the natives, oh yeah.

Rodney wasn’t participating in the conversation. Sheppard shot him a couple of looks, got ridiculous faces made at him in return.

“So, Rodney,” Sheppard said, turning everyone’s attention to him. “You fix that thing you broke last week?”

“What thing?” Rodney asked in return, as if he genuinely didn’t remember.

“I don’t know.” Sheppard waved a hand in the air. “It was important. It involved life support.”

“Oh,” Rodney said. “That.” He dropped his chin. “No. Zelenka’s on it.”

Sheppard blinked at him. Rodney’s chin came back up. “I’ve been _busy_.”

Busy harassing Keller’s staff, but Sheppard didn’t say that.

“Life support’s important,” was all he said.

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Whatever,” he said. “Other things on my mind.”

“Five minutes,” Keller’s voice came over the Isolation intercom. Sheppard wasn’t aware there was a time limit. He’s amused by the simultaneous expressions of annoyance and refusal that crossed both Teyla and Ronon’s faces. He found he wasn’t too upset; he didn’t like holding court like this. It was tiring, and he also really didn’t want to talk about the subject they all clearly had on their minds.

“You heard the lady,” Sheppard said, not bothering to conceal that he’s okay with it.

“We may visit you now?” Teyla asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m bored out of my mind.”

She said goodbye to him in a less formal way, just patting him on the shoulder and promising to return soon. Ronon didn’t try to crush his head again, but he did kind of look like he wanted to.

“I can’t spar with you, buddy,” Sheppard said. He tried to playfully poke Ronon in the stomach with his pointer finger. The effort actually hurt because Ronon’s stupid abs were solid as concrete. “Ow!” He jerked his hand back. “Just bring checkers or something.”

He expected Ronon to make a face. Board games weren’t his thing. But Ronon just nodded.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, and followed Teyla out of the room. Sheppard sighed. He would really prefer to be treated like everything was normal, and that included Ronon acting like all things from Earth were inherently stupid.

“Hey, Rodney,” Sheppard said, since McKay was angling for the door. “Wait a sec.”

Rodney turned around, still in the doorway. “What?”

Sheppard motioned him over. “Come here.”

Letting the door shut, Rodney took about three steps closer. “What is it?”

It was really interesting – and also annoying – the times when Rodney’s paranoia chose to come out.  Sheppard resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Closer,” he said. He patted the side of the bed near his pillow.

Finally, Rodney walked ‘til he was right beside Sheppard’s bedside. “What?” he asked again.

Moving fast, Sheppard reached up and grabbed McKay by the shoulders, interlocking his arms behind the man’s back and pulling him down close to Sheppard’s face. From the observation room it should look like a really manly hug.

Except that Rodney squealed, tried to jerk free, and managed to ram an elbow into Sheppard’s incision. Agony sliced through his midsection. Sheppard tasted bile in the back of his throat, in too much pain to scream or too puke. He must have let go of Rodney, because when he could focus on anything besides the burning, the man was against the far wall again.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Sheppard yelled.

“You tried to hug me!” Rodney yelled right back.

Sheppard just stared at him. “Major abdominal surgery,” he decided on. “Ow!”

“That thing!” Rodney said, still yelling. “It’s in your brain now, isn’t it?”

Sheppard dropped back against the gurney. “Forget it. Would you go get Teyla?”

“Teyla?” Rodney didn’t move towards the door. “Why?”

“Because she won’t punch me in the freshly healing surgical incision,” Sheppard snapped. “And she’ll _listen_.”

“Listen?” said Rodney, for once using his big brain instead of his big mouth.

“Yes,” Sheppard said. “ _Listen_.”

Slowly, Rodney walked back to the gurney. Just as hesitantly, he leaned over Sheppard’s torso, arms out awkwardly.

Sheppard did the same thing as before, maybe this time making sure to pin Rodney’s arms to his sides with his elbows, and his hands ending up tightly around the man’s ears. Because _goddamn_ that had hurt.

“Listen,” Sheppard whispered. “I think the medical staff is hiding something from me. They aren’t telling the whole story. I need you to –”

“I can’t a word you’re saying,” Rodney interrupted, voice hushed and yet screechy. “Your hands are over my ears.”

The only reason Sheppard moved fast was because this was quickly becoming the longest, most suspicious hug in history. He put his hands on the side of Rodney’s face, instead. “Medical staff acting weird,” he summarized, quietly. “I want you to hack into their database and find out what they’re not telling me.”

“ _Hack_?” Rodney said, way too loudly.

Sheppard let go of him, gave him a hard shove away for good measure.

“Yeah, McKay,” he said. “They hacked me open. Okay?”

Rodney got it, even if he wanted to ask a billion questions. “Okay,” he said, slowly.

Keller appeared in the doorway. “You should let him rest,” she said to Rodney.  To Sheppard: “You doing okay?”

Sheppard ripped down the sheet. “You can check my incision, if you want.”

“Eww,” said Rodney, and made for the door. Sheppard couldn’t see his face, hoped he was thinking about how to break into Sheppard’s medical record file.

“I _do_ want to,” Keller said, far too cheerfully. She was snapping on gloves and coming closer. “Read my mind.”

~

After that, his team visited a whole lot. Rarely all together, which was okay since as a group they tended to focus on why Sheppard was in Isolation, whereas one on one he could usually persuade each of them to go along with a less horrific distraction.

Teyla played board games with Sheppard. Checkers, mostly, although various crew members had also dropped off Life, Shoots and Ladders, and Sorry. Teyla was equal parts interested in and baffled by the children’s games. It was kind of fun to play them with her, once, mostly to watch her reactions. One time through was pretty much enough, though, and then they stuck to Checkers. They tried Scrabble, a couple of times. It wasn’t really fair, though, since Teyla basically had to stick to variations of words ending in ‘at’ and ‘et,’ and Sheppard cheating was only going to mess with her poor grasp on literacy.  Also, Rodney tattled on him by telling her “kruvy’ wasn’t a word, and after that she started bringing a dictionary with her. Other than that embarrassing little incident, her visits were mild and fairly relaxing. She mostly didn’t try to talk about how sick Sheppard was, probably taking her cue from him. But he could always read the concern and stress on her face, mostly right before she departed each visit. So, that sucked.

He didn’t even try to subject Ronon to board games. Even though watching the man get annoyed was, on occasion, pretty damn amusing. Instead, Keller let them move a DVD player and a laptop into the room. Someone, fortunately, was screening their selections. Nothing in the science-fiction genre, sure as hell nothing from the _Alien_ series, and nothing that had someone dying as a major plot point. Sheppard wasn’t sure who was doing the censoring. He didn’t think Rodney had enough pop culture knowledge to do it that thoroughly, although to a certain extent you could guess by the DVD cover. They ended up watching a lot of comedies. Sheppard was pretty sure he was warping Ronon’s view of Earth culture, but hey. It worked as a distraction for both of them. Ronon’s silent presence was actually more reassuring – more easily comfortable and stabilizing – than any conversation would be.

Sheppard’s Marines must have had a conference on what they would have wanted if they were confined to Isolation, because they had Keller deliver a large black box to him. She claimed she didn’t know what it was, and when Sheppard peered inside he found an astonishingly large collection of porn. Useless to him for a few terrible reasons, so he gave it to Ronon. He appreciated the thought, though, asked Keller to pass on his gratitude. Pink-faced, she agreed.

Rodney, of course, refused to be either distracted or reassuring about anything. He brought a chess board, mainly as a prop so Keller wouldn’t accuse him of agitating Sheppard and kick him out. He wanted to talk about it, about the thing living in Sheppard’s gut. As much fun as that wasn’t, Rodney was the only one acting like it was a problem that should have a solution.

“So, they figure out where you picked up the sidecar passenger yet?” Rodney asked.

That was a new way of referring to it. Sheppard wasn’t sure he liked it. “No,” he said.

“Because we should make really, really sure that we never go back there ever, ever again,” Rodney continued.

“I agree,” Sheppard said. He moved a pawn, distractedly.

Rodney looked grossed out. “Can’t they just review your body scans?  See when it wasn’t there? Ergo, the next mission is where you got it.”

Sheppard waited for Rodney to remember the board and make his own move. “I missed a couple of those,” he said, softly.

For a second, Rodney didn’t understand, or he wasn’t listening as he moved a pawn of his own. “What?” he asked, a second later.

Sheppard didn’t repeat himself, instead just moving another pawn. He did it without looking at the board all that much, meaning he’d probably just enabled Rodney to kick his ass.

“What?” Rodney said, again and louder.

Sheppard glanced up. “Body scans,” he said. “I missed some.”

Keller had not yelled. She hadn’t even scolded. Probably had decided it wasn’t worth it. Rodney, evidently, didn’t agree.

“Why?” asked Rodney. He wasn’t screaming yet, but had reached the volume where that was next.

Sheppard waved a hand in the air, over the chess pieces. “Various reasons. And you don’t –”

But Rodney was off and away, starting with the fact that Sheppard had disregarded a security protocol that he himself had helped to write – which was true – and going from there.

“Rodney, I _know_ -” Sheppard tried to interrupt.

“Any idea how _stupid_ -” Rodney yelled, worked up and losing track of what exactly he wanted to say. “I get a body scan every _single_ time we come in, and I hate the infirmary!”

“Yeah, me too,” Sheppard mumbled.  “And you’re a hypochondriac.” He put one hand up to the side of his face and waited for Rodney to run out of words.

“I don’t have a parasite living inside me!” Rodney retorted.

The volume brought two orderlies, but not Dr. Keller, so that meant Rodney didn’t really have to stop.

“Everything okay?” asked one orderly. The other was fingering his headset and whispering, probably calling Keller.

“Everything’s fine,” Sheppard said.

“He’s a moron,” Rodney said, but substantially quieter than everything else.

The orderlies looked at each other, clearly unsure if they should leave the patient to get browbeaten some more.

“He’s done,” Sheppard promised them. “You’re done, right?”

“ _No_ ,” said Rodney. “Not by a long –” Sheppard glared and Rodney stubbornly crossed his arms. “ _Fine_. I will be done for now.”

Sheppard nodded and waved the orderlies away. “We’re good.”

Rodney had gone silent, but it was the bad kind of silent, the judgmentally glaring kind of silent.

“Let’s just play,” Sheppard said, sighing. “Unless you want to try using sound waves to disintegrate this thing.” He patted his belly.

He got more silence.

“I’ll let you win,” Sheppard tried.

That worked. “You don’t _let_ me win.”

“Uh-huh.” Sheppard gestured at the board, “ _Go_.”

They played in silence for a few minutes, until Rodney smirked and put Sheppard’s queen in Check.

“Nice,” Sheppard said, and scowled. He made a totally useless move, then he changed the subject. “So, that thing I asked you to look into?”

“I’m working on it,” Rodney said, crisply and without elaboration. He reached out and flicked Sheppard’s queen down.

Sheppard watched the piece fall and loll in place on the board.

“Is it _hard_?” he asked. In as much as he wasn’t entirely sure there’d be anything to tell, he did think it’d be easy to get at.

“It’s not easy,” Rodney said. He looked annoyed that Sheppard was questioning his skill. “It’s _private_. There are security measures.”

Sheppard looked pointedly up at the observation window. “Yeah?” he asked.

“I don’t want to get caught –” Rodney started to say, then he followed Sheppard’s gaze and finally made the connection. “- in the particle accelerator beam.”

“That’d be bad,” Sheppard agreed.

“Not really,” Rodney said. “I’d blame you.”

“Do me a favor,” Sheppard said. “Keep trying.”

Rodney paused. “You’re really serious about this. You really think…” he trailed off.

“Yeah.” Sheppard pointedly rested his arm on his abdomen. “I do.”

“I’ll let you know,” Rodney said. He looked like he wanted to say more, but Keller arrived shortly and kicked him out.

~

There were a few constant reminders of the beast living inside Sheppard. He was gaining weight, now, consistently. Along with it came a persistent, unnatural hunger. It reminded Sheppard of his teenage appetite, really, the kind of eating habits that he’d had to abandon in his early thirties because he no longer had the metabolism to support it. Except now, it was just another sinister and frightening thing, made even worse by the fact that it was manifested by something that Sheppard couldn’t ignore. He did try, since it probably wasn’t the height of mental health to be getting irritated with his own body for communicating its hunger. But then he was just crankier and really incredibly snappish at every orderly that had to interact with him, so he finally ‘fessed up to Keller.

He didn’t quite anticipate her reaction when he told her that the standard three meals a day weren’t cutting it, and if she could give him a salt shaker to suckle on that would make him really happy.

First, of course, she marked down those symptoms on the ever-growing list. Then, she looked at him and said: “Well, we can’t starve it out. And I’d like to keep you as comfortable as possible.”

“I’m _real_ comfortable,” Sheppard said. Keller ignored him, as she usually did. He knew he wasn’t helping, he just couldn’t stop.

“Well,” Keller said, “the good news is that you haven’t lost weight. It’s not consuming energy your body needs to function. I’d like to keep it that way. We’ll see about setting you up a snackbar.”

“Shouldn’t it be?” Sheppard asked, pretending he didn’t think it was cool he was going to get a snackbar. “It’s a parasite? Shouldn’t it be taking every calorie I eat? Or something?”

Keller shrugged. “Not necessarily. Its own survival is dependent on yours, at the moment.”

“At the moment?”

This time, Keller’s shrug was a lot less happy. “Some parasites require multiple hosts to complete their lifecycle. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. It’s developing without making you seriously ill or threatening your life.”

“Developing into what?” Sheppard asked. He resisted the urge to poke himself in the stomach. He never felt it, and it made him feel dumb.

Keller shrugged again, and shook her head. It wasn’t very reassuring. Sheppard asked to see it on a bodyscan. As usual, Keller showed him the very first image – the one that looked like a big pink indistinct blob. It didn’t look any different. He knew there were more detailed pictures. Seven people shoved a scanner against his belly every single day. They’d filmed the exploratory surgery. She just didn’t want him to see what it was.

He didn’t think accusing her of that would make her show it to him. Instead, he pretended like it wasn’t totally obvious that she was thwarting his requests.

“The plan’s to make it dead, right?”

Keller nodded, but it was slow and hesitant. “Without endangering you.”

Except that they hadn’t come up with any brilliant way of doing that. They couldn’t cut it out surgically without the likelihood that Sheppard would bleed out during it, and even if they risked that Keller had painted a hideous picture of the incredible amount of brain damage Sheppard would end up with, in the improbable event that he even survived the procedure. Bottom line, it seemed that anything medical that would harm the organism would ultimately be more harmful if not fatal to Sheppard. That’s what Keller kept saying, anyway. It wasn’t that Sheppard didn’t believe her, mostly, it was just that he also wanted to know why she wouldn’t show him what exactly the hell was living inside of him. Maybe it looked just as unkillable as she was saying.

He didn’t like being kept in the dark – the paranoia and suspicion that was causing was making him feel even crazier than constant awareness that there was something living inside of him. He was also pretty sure he should be offended that Keller thought he could be distracted with food. She had the cafeteria move a tiny refrigerator into the isolation room, and keep him supplied with milk, juice, cereal, raw fruit, and vegetables. This made him really popular with visitors, especially Ronon and Rodney, who each helped themselves and were possibly enjoying the snackbar more than visiting their critically ill CO. Sheppard supposed that while he was technically more comfortable, he was still pissed off about everything, including the fact that Keller hadn’t  fulfilled the craving he had for salt. And sugar, too, actually. He really wanted salty and sugary things. It was like being ten. If he lived though this, and survived the organism growing to maturity and busting through his chest wall or however it intended to get out of his body, Sheppard was going to be a flabby marshmallow.

McKay still hadn’t succeeded at Sheppard’s request. He claimed he was working on it. Sheppard didn’t think for a second that the Atlantis infirmary had better virtual security than Wraith hive ships or any number of ridiculously complicated alien technology McKay had overridden in mere minutes in the past. Sheppard should have asked Teyla or Ronon, he decided. Sure, they couldn’t read English very well, but neither did they get flustered and distracted when Keller flipped her hair and smiled. Okay, Ronon kind of did, but Sheppard allowed him that.

The other thought Sheppard was entertaining made him a lot less happy. And that was that McKay was now in on the conspiracy. He didn’t think Keller would have to try real hard, either. His suspicions only increased when Rodney brought Sheppard a plate of his sister’s cookies. Rodney guarded those with a zeal reserved only for ZPMs and homemade baked goods. He’d designed some kind airtight temperature-controlled cookie jar that made the contents stay fresh for a ridiculously long time and probably had some equally high tech burglar alarm.  He either thought Sheppard’s death was imminent – which was unfortunately a definite possibility – or he was feeling guilty.

“Jeannie’s cookies?” Sheppard asked, when he peeled back the napkin covering the plate. Rodney had hustled it in looking so furtive, Sheppard had half expected it to be data stolen from the medical database.

“Yeah,” Rodney said. He looked around the room, avoiding eye contact. “Keller said your alien parasite was craving sweet things.”

“I am,” Sheppard said, and shoved a cookie in his mouth out of the possibility that when he proceeded to piss Rodney off, the man would take them away. Also, Jeannie’s chocolate chip cookies were really good.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Demanded Rodney, confirming that he wasn’t doing this out of the goodness of his heart, since Sheppard wasn’t doing anything except chewing.

“Like what?” Sheppard asked, mouth full. “Thanks, Rodney.” He swiped a few more cookies off the plate.

“I don’t like them all that much,” Rodney said, defensively. “They’re vegan, did you know that? Probably have soy chips or something.”

“They’re good,” Sheppard said. “I said thank you.”

“Don’t tell Ronon I have any,” Rodney said. He was relaxing a little in his seat, but he still had the jittery posture. He was a terrible, guilty liar. “He said he’d hold me upside by the ankles and shake them out of me."

“Yeah?” Sheppard asked. “Sounds useful.”

“What?”

Sheppard looked at him pointedly.

“Hey!” Rodney scooted his chair back. “I am still working on…that.”

“Right,” Sheppard said. “And in the meantime you bring me cookies. You’re really subtle, Rodney.”

“Cookies, huh?” Somehow Keller had strolled silently in the room. She was looking reproachfully at Rodney. For a multitude of reasons, Sheppard guessed.

“Want some?” Sheppard asked, innocently. He held out the plate.

“You said he wanted sweets,” Rodney said, already defending himself.

“I do,” Sheppard confirmed.

“I didn’t say he could have any,” Keller said.

“Why not?” Sheppard asked, scooping a handful under his sheet before she noticed. It was really the only act of resistance he could come up with.

“Because you’re incredible sedentary, undergoing unknown physiological changes, and probably going to be surgical soon,” Keller said, sounding far too reasonable. “The last thing you need is an unhealthy diet.”

“They’re vegan,” said Sheppard.

“Next time,” Keller said to Rodney. “Ask me?”

“Fine,” Rodney said, but he was already standing up, clearly being chased away. He reached for the plate, but Sheppard grabbed it and held on. “Give me that.”

The recent ab surgery meant Sheppard couldn’t actually play tug-o-war, but he could send Rodney flailing across the room when he finally let go. That was almost satisfying. He watched the eye contact between Keller and McKay as the other man exited, sure they were communicating something.

“You’d deny a dying man cookies?” he asked Keller.

“You aren’t dying,” she said, but didn’t manage to look particularly convinced.

 

~


	4. Uncertain Thing 4/5

It took nearly two and a half months into his stay in Isolation, but Sheppard finally found out what Keller was keeping from him. McKay never came through; he was fairly certain that it wasn’t because of the amazing security of the medical computer system and had more to do with Keller putting a stop to it. Sheppard tried, himself, to hack into the database with his laptop. He only half knew what he was doing and had no idea what he was looking for, and ending up falling asleep in the middle of it.

He was tired now. Despite the fact that he’d mostly been flat on his back on a gurney, in a tiny room that was only about twelve paces wide. Sheppard found himself napping like a four year old. Keller noted it, but she didn’t look alarmed. He didn’t know why; it was pretty damn alarming to him. The creature inside him was getting bigger – he’d gained a total of twenty-four pounds and couldn’t wear his pants anymore. And now it was sapping his energy, too.

That was the only thing that changed. He was still trapped in Isolation, bored out of his fucking mind in the moments where he wasn’t thinking about the evil parasite taking over his body.

His team was still visiting regularly. Ronon had been reassigned to Lorne’s team. He told Sheppard pretty much immediately, and whereas Sheppard should have been appreciative that at least one person in the goddamn city was being honest and direct, it mostly just pissed him off. He knew Ronon, of all people, had an innate need to stay occupied and could get downright destructive if bored. But that didn’t mean he wanted to hear about how his team was going to be dismantled after his death while he was still living.

Teyla was bopping around, occasionally going on missions with other teams, but mostly hanging out with her people. Specifically this Kanaan guy. Sheppard was sure he was a nice, proper Athosian, but that didn’t mean he wanted to hear about how much fun Teyla was having with him.

Rodney came around less. Probably because he expected Sheppard to be pissed at him. Which he was, but not enough that Rodney should be avoiding him. Sheppard left a message on Rodney’s voice comm. to that effect, adding in the fact that if Sheppard died while Rodney was staying away, he’d feel really, really bad about it. The guilt trip worked, mostly because Rodney showed up immediately to yell at Sheppard and insist he wasn’t going to die.

So, it was mostly the same. He watched dumb movies with Ronon, made meaningless chitchat with Teyla, and played mindless chess while Rodney babbled. It probably wasn’t a bad way to spend the last few months of his life. He wasn’t in pain. Really angry and bitter, but not suffering.

Even so, he tried to be cooperative with the medical staff. Being nice took a lot of effort, especially since he’d exhausted his reserves for tolerating the constant invasion of his privacy on pretty much the second day in Isolation. But he also figured if he were polite and not combative, eventually someone would slip and tell him something they weren’t allowed to.

In the end, it was an Israeli xenobiologist who spilled. Dr. Avi Lautmann kind of looked like Santa Claus – except Jewish – and was one of the scientists who showed up daily to shove a scanner against Sheppard’s belly. He didn’t have the best bedside manner, evidently unaccustomed to specimens that could talk back. Sheppard didn’t mind all that much; he preferred being basically ignored to being coddled and patronized like some of his caretakers did until he said something horrible to them or accidentally (sort of)  knocked their tablet to the floor and broke it. Lautmann was also really, really excited by whatever it was he saw on the scanner screen.

Excited enough, Sheppard thought, maybe to share exactly what it was that he was seeing. He waited until Lautmann had the portable scanner set up over Sheppard’s stomach, cooperating in a way that he didn’t always do. The easier he made this, maybe the easier Lautmann would forget he wasn’t supposed to talk about it.

Lautmann had his face shoved practically against the little view screen, mumbling enthusiastically to himself and jotting down words in a spiral notebook propped up on a clipboard against Sheppard’s thigh. It was really old-fashioned and quaint, but Sheppard didn’t mind because it was lighter than the laptops everyone else used to take notes about him. Also, he’d stolen it once, only to discover, of course, that Lautmann was writing in Hebrew. There’d been a couple of meaningless diagrams, but the xenobiologist’s art skills tended towards the abstract.

“So, Avi,” Sheppard drawled when he thought the man was suitably engrossed in his work. “Keller said you could explain this thing to me better than her?”

“Hrm?” said Lautmann. He didn’t look up, which was perfect since Sheppard wasn’t sure that his plan would hold if they made eye contact. “Oh, I don’t know about that. About the same, I think. Is not really explainable.” And then he laughed, which was totally bizarre.

“Yeah?” Sheppard said, trying to sound casual. “She said you’d try.” There was silence, so he went on hurriedly. “You’re in here the most, looks like you know the most about it.” That part, at least, wasn’t a lie.

“Well,” Lautmann said. “Is absolutely amazing. I have never seen anything like this."

He sounded strangely _positive_ , like the parasite was _impressive_ or something.

“Yeah?” Sheppard said again, unable to disguise his annoyance.

“I suppose you disagree,” Lautmann said, abruptly looking a little embarrassed. “But an alien organism that can successfully imitate human female reproductive system including functional uterus is unbelievable discovery.”

Sheppard sat up so abruptly he knocked the paper notebook and the scanner to the floor. He heard it crash and probably shatter, but he didn’t register anything else. “Uterus?” he asked. “ _What_?”

Lautmann was on his knees on the floor next the cracked scanner, sadly poking at the shards from the screen. “You broke scanner.”

Sheppard reached down, got a fistful of the man’s lab coat and pulled violently upwards. It made his incision sting a little, but he ignored it. “Did you say _uterus_?” he demanded. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

Lautmann immediately twisted out of his grasp. For an old, fat man, he did something incredibly painful to Sheppard’s wrist and instantly broke his grip. Sheppard remembered belatedly that all Israelis were ex-army.

“Oww,” Sheppard said, holding his arm.

“Sorry,” Lautmann said, looking genuinely apologetic and standing only a few feet from the gurney. He also looked betrayed, defensively crossing his arms over his massive chest. “You tricked me.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, not sorry at all. “Get Keller the hell down here.”

~

 “I didn’t tell you,” Keller said, flatly. “Because I believed it would be detrimental to your health.” She pointed to the monitors by the gurney. “And it is. Your blood pressure has shot up. You’re already hypertensive.”

Sheppard was sorely tempted to threaten to be detrimental to her health, if he didn’t think she’d just dope him unconscious or something.

“I don’t care,” he said, might have fairly growled. “Don’t change the subject.”

Surprisingly, Keller kind of dipped her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Sheppard gripped the edge of the gurney so tightly he felt the bed frame creak. He just needed to hold on to something.

“Tell me everything,” he ordered. “All of it. Right now.”

Keller finally showed him a picture. And even though that’s what Sheppard had been after for nearly three months, the first thing he did after looking at it was lean over the side of the gurney and vomit.

Because he knew what it was. Because he recognized it, immediately. His brother had shown him the sonograms for both his nephews; in Afghanistan members of his squad had taped the ultrasounds of their unborn kids on their walls next to photos of their wives. And that’s exactly what it looked like.

Gingerly, maybe expecting he was mad enough to strike out at her, Keller help him roll back to the center of the gurney and quickly and efficiently cleaned him up. Lautmann, standing awkwardly at the far wall and looking really, really guilty, made himself useful and went and got Sheppard a cup of water to rinse his mouth.

“You can’t be _serious_ ,” Sheppard said, after he’d spat a few mouthfuls of water into the proffered emesis basin. Even though he’d seen it with his own eyes. “It’s not what it looks like.”

Keller opened her mouth, took a breath, then flicked her eyes at Lautmann. “All we know,” she said, after a second. “Is what it looks like.”

“But,” Lautmann interjected, softly but firmly. “In all ways, it looks like what you think.”

“The physiological changes you’ve experienced,” Keller went on, keeping her voice down, “are consistent with it, particularly your hormone levels.”

“Which you haven’t mentioned,” Sheppard accused.

Keller nodded. “They’re atypical for…” she paused, and he knew what she was trying to avoid saying or even implying. “Atypical,” she said, finally. “You may have noticed some signs. Slowed facial hair growth, for instance.”

Sheppard touched his face. “I’m scruffy,” he said. But he hadn’t shaved in pretty much forever.

“By now you should have beard like me,” Lautmann said.

“And your other problem,” Keller said, “is also probably hormone related.”

Sheppard grabbed the edge of the gurney even harder. “This is ridiculous,” he said. He heard the note of panic in his voice. “This doesn’t happen.”

“Do you want a sedative?” Keller asked, and at least she was requesting his permission first.

“No!” Sheppard tried to slow his breathing, tried to visibly calm himself. Acting like a nutcase wasn’t going to help.

“Okay,” Keller said. She glanced at Lautmann for some kind of support, but Lautmann looked more uncomfortable than she did. Sheppard figured he wasn’t used to his samples having emotions.

“Who knows?” he asked, leaning back against the gurney.

“The medical staff directly involved in your treatment,” Keller said. Then, she amended it to “observation,” because, of course, they weren’t actively doing anything about this. “Lautmann’s xenobiology department-”

“Very few, quiet people,” Lautmann said, trying to be reassuring.

“And Carter,” Keller finished. “That’s all.”

“Not my team?” Sheppard asked.

  
“No,” Keller said. “Although, I caught Rodney hacking into your medical records file.”

“I asked him to,” Sheppard said. “I knew you were lying to me about something.”

“For your own good,” Keller said, but she looked really guilty and Sheppard was glad. “I told him that. He doesn’t know the specifics.”

“Is no reason to be ashamed,” Lautmann said. He patted Sheppard’s shoulder with a big hand. “Is private matter, yes, but you should not be embarrassed.”

“I wouldn’t describe myself as _embarrassed_ ,” Sheppard said, angrily, and the man hurriedly removed his hand.

Sheppard looked down at himself, at his protruding stomach under the sheet. Then he looked up at Keller and swallowed down as much emotion as he could. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“In my professional opinion,” Keller said, carefully. “The game plan has not changed. The goal is to ensure your survival and terminate the organism.”

“Organism,” Sheppard echoed.

“To our knowledge,” Lautmann said, “is alien life form imitating human fetus.”

“There is no reason to believe that it is what it looks like,” Keller interrupted.

“Because I’m _male_ ,” Sheppard said.

Lautmann kind of looked like he wanted to launch into a much more complicated explanation; Sheppard recognized that expression from Rodney’s face, except Rodney didn’t usually shut up. “Yes,” was all Lautmann said.

“If you were female,” Keller said, “things would be different. But the organism and its structure are entirely alien to your physiology.”

“You do not have uterus,” Lautmann said.

“I _know_ that!”

“I guess it doesn’t feel this way,” Keller continued, and he could tell she was trying to be comforting. “But this probably good news.”

“Yeah?” Sheppard demanded. “How’s that?”

“Is not trying to kill you,” Lautmann said.

“If it is imitating human fetal development,” Keller said. “There is a natural and predictable end point to its...” she paused and trailed off.

“To it living _inside me_ ,” Sheppard provided.

“Yes,” Keller said, and Lautmann nodded.

“And just how the hell do you think it’s going to get out?” Sheppard asked. He was trying to keep from yelling, but that wasn’t working so well.

“Surgically,” said Keller.

“You tried that already,” Sheppard said. “You couldn’t do it without killing me, remember?”

Keller nodded. “That’s changed. Rather, it is changing.”

“In my observation, the supporting structure that has compromised your internal organs is reducing over time,” Lautmann said.

“What?” Sheppard asked. “What does that mean?”

“Do you want to see?” Keller asked, and he supposed that was fair since he had thrown up the first time.

“Yeah,” he said.  

Keller pulled out the same body scan she’d been showing him from the beginning. “Those,” she said, pointing to the pink wisps trailing around his abdomen. “They’re vanishing.”

“Dying, more likely,” Lautmann said. He hit a button and nearly half of the little pink lines turned a dull gray. “Still there, but not functional.”

“That’s over the past three months,” Keller said. “I think it’s a gradual process preparing for…"

“Birth,” Sheppard said.

“Departure,” Keller said. “It wants to leave, Colonel. That’s good.”

“So enough of those tentacles let go of my kidneys,” Sheppard said, “You can cut it out?”

“They aren’t tentacles,” Keller said. “But yeah, I think so.”

“That is good,” Sheppard said. He didn’t feel all that much better, but he no longer wanted to puke.

“My one concern,” Keller said, “is that while these things are declining, your blood pressure has been rising.”

“It relates to blood flow within the organism,” Lautmann said. And he was back to looking excited. “Its circulatory system –”

“It’s probably only going to get worse,” Keller interrupted. “I’m going to be monitoring you very closely. But I want you to tell me if you start feeling more fatigued, get headaches, experience dizziness, blurred vision, ringing in your ears, or feel flushed. It can be very dangerous.”

“Okay,” Sheppard said. “How long we looking at?”

Keller and Lautmann exchanged looks. “It’s difficult to be sure,” she said. “But based purely on its developmental progress, I’d guess at least 12 weeks.”

“Three months,” Sheppard translated.

“About.”

“Okay,” Sheppard said. He paused. “You could have told me from the beginning. You should have.”

Keller nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said, but he wasn’t sure he believed her.

~

It turned out that maybe Keller had had a point. Knowing what it was – more specifically knowing what it was pretending to be – didn’t actually do anything for Sheppard’s peace of mind. In fact it was kind of driving him crazy, so much so that it was really all he could think about. It didn’t even help that Keller seemed to think that he probably wasn’t going to die now. He didn’t feel any relief.

Well, he did feel some relief, but not about that. Sheppard was just really, incredibly glad that wherever he’d picked up this goddamn thing, it’d latched on to him and not to Teyla. He had no idea what’d it do in a body actually capable of pregnancy – maybe there’d be no tentacle stranglehold on her lungs – but it somehow seemed like it would be so much worse.

Now, they let him look at all the pictures and scans they had of it. He almost threw up again, especially when Lautmann pointed at an indistinct shadow on the scan and said: “Is a girl. There is vulva.”

Keller took the scanner away before Sheppard accidentally broke another one. Then she hauled Lautmann out of the room, presumably for a discussion on what he should and should not say.

What they weren’t saying was weighing heavily in Sheppard’s thoughts. Most of the staff didn’t talk to him about it at all, but those who did deliberately avoided the words that they obviously would have used if he’d been a woman. Except all the synonyms for ‘gestation,’ and ‘birth’ were incredibly obvious and awkward. One of the nurses accidentally called it a baby, turned white, and made an immediate excuse to leave the room. Sheppard didn’t get upset. Well, he didn’t get _more_ upset.

“What’s the plan for when it’s out?” he asked Keller that night, as she did her usual checks of all the monitors before he went to sleep.

“Hmm?” Keller paused and looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“When it’s out,” he said again, and gestured at his stomach. He didn’t look pregnant, which was one small mercy. He looked fat, mostly, or conspicuously bloated. Lautmann said it was because the alien uterus wasn’t in quite the same place as it would be for a woman. Lautmann said lots of marginally helpful things like that. Sometimes it was more horrifying than informative.

“I mean,” he said finally, “What if it still looks like a human?”

“It’s not,” Keller said, far too quickly. “That’s not possible.”

Sheppard just looked at her. He didn’t have to say anything to communicate just how many impossible things they’d already encountered in Pegasus.

“We’ll use standard alien life form protocols,” Keller said, which was probably true but still somehow, a totally inadequate answer. “No matter what it looks like. Don’t worry about that now.”

~

In other news that Sheppard could actually mentally process, they’d narrowed down the list of missions in the timeframe that the medical staff thought the thing had planted itself inside him. How they’d determined that, Sheppard wasn’t entirely sure. They didn’t know how long it had taken for the organism to build the artificial endocrine system. Sheppard didn’t know if he should want it to be slowly or quickly.  The doctors had settled on ‘fast,’ though, and that what they were going with. There were only five missions in the identified timeframe. Two had been to uninhabited planets left barren and empty by the Wraith.  Those missions had been unremarkable, just depressing as always. It seemed unlikely that a parasite that reproduced by imitating human reproduction – Lautmann’s typical helpful and yet repulsive assessment – would have been hanging around in either environment.

A third had involved actively fleeing the Wraith. Sheppard didn’t actually remember this one, having been stunned into unconsciousness. He’d been woken up by the pain of Teyla and Rodney dragging him towards the ‘Gate by the arms, Ronon having taken off to go after the Wraith. Nothing conclusive, but no one remembered any living humans on that particular planet. And that was one time Sheppard had gotten a full body scan, namely because he thought Teyla and Rodney might have dislocated his shoulders.

The fourth and fifth missions were judged the most likely contenders. One had been a standard trade mission to M3X-106, antibiotics and seedlings for a season’s worth of bean crops or something. Sheppard didn’t remember this one either, because it’d been normal. And because Ronon had convinced him to play a Satedan drinking game with the ale the chieftain had gifted them. If it turned out Sheppard had gotten knocked up with an alien parasite while drunk off of his ass…well…Sheppard wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but it would probably involve a combination of laughing and then crying hysterically. 

The fifth mission was the one to the broken mountain face covered in goat shit and its guano-coated caverns of naked unconsciousness. This planet was a lot more suspicious.

Except that Sheppard had had a body scan after this mission, as well. And there was absolutely nothing on it. Not even a stray speck of dust. Keller and Lautmann weren’t convinced by it, though. They used words like ‘zygote’ and ‘blastocyst’, stages of embryonic development that were too small to be detected on the massive scale of the body scanner. There was also the possibility that the organism skipped those stages, only needing to imitate the phases where its host might be aware of its presence.

That was when they got to the timeframe where Sheppard had skipped a bunch of body scans. His next one had the giant pink blob on it.

Carter sent reconnaissance teams to both planets, under strict instructions to gather information without putting anyone in danger. Sheppard wondered how specific their orders were, if they mentioned anything about asking the natives about any unexplained incidents of male pregnancy. He didn’t know if the teams knew the missions were about Sheppard’s condition. As much as he felt that being infected by an alien parasite was just another in a long line of mysterious and ultimately really unpleasant shit served up by the Pegasus galaxy – a chain of which Keller and Lautmann were mostly ignoring in favor of  repeating constantly that this wasn’t his fault and he shouldn’t be ashamed of it, like two goddamn rape counselors – he also really didn’t want anyone more than was absolutely necessary knowing he had something that looked an awful lot like an unborn human baby living in his gut.

He did, however, tell his team. It seemed likely that Rodney already knew or nearly knew. Actually, probably not. No way would he be able to keep his mouth shut about it. He knew something Keller had made up, which might be worse. Sheppard would have to fix that. Ronon and Teyla were around too much for him to not tell. He generally didn’t lie to them and didn’t really want to start. Besides, despite Keller’s new confidence that he’d probably survive, he might not be around much longer.

Teyla and Ronon reacted well to it. Better than Sheppard would have, in their position. It confirmed to him that they were really far too used to totally bizarre shit happening. Especially to Sheppard. That seemed unfair.

Teyla’s eyes got really huge and she tilted her head to the side. “A human child?” she said, disbelieving. And of course, she was staring at his abdomen.

“That’s what it _looks_ like,” Sheppard said.

Teyla looked at him like she didn’t fully understand how that made a difference.

“The xenobiologists think it’s an organism imitating human reproduction,” Sheppard said. “Sort of like a cuckoo bird.”

That just made Teyla stare at him.

“It’s a bird on earth that lays its eggs in other bird’s nests,” Sheppard explained. “It takes the other eggs away. Only in this case, it’s an alien. And it thought my intestines were a nest. Or something.”

He wasn’t sure she got the comparison.

“But you are _male_ ,” she said.

“Apparently it couldn’t tell.”

Teyla stared at him, obviously searching for something reassuring and kind to say, and yet coming up empty.

“I take it you’ve never heard of anything like this in Pegasus?” Sheppard asked. He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to say yes or no. It’d be nice to know he didn’t just have the worst luck ever, and that this had happened to other people. At the same time, he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay in this galaxy a second longer if this was legitimate threat.

“No,” Teyla said, emphatically. “Women are the child-bearers,” she added.

“Where I’m from, too,” Sheppard told her, and sighed.

She did like hearing that Keller thought this meant it wasn’t trying to kill Sheppard.

“That is good news,” she said.

Sheppard shrugged. “Relative to everything else, yeah.”

Teyla was still staring at his sheet-covered midsection.

“Do you feel it?” she asked, and then abruptly looked almost embarrassed. 

“No,” he said. “Keller said it’s positioned so that I really won’t.” Which was totally and completely fine with him.

Teyla seemed to understand he didn’t really want to talk about it anymore – or that there wasn’t much else to say –  and politely changed the subject.

Ronon didn’t want to talk about it much, either. He listened as Sheppard explained the situation, a weird expression of confusion and possibly disgust coming across his face.

“A baby?” he said, when Sheppard was done.

“Alien baby,” Sheppard corrected, not bothering to dispute it.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Ronon said.

“I _can’t_ ,” Sheppard growled. “It built itself a wom – a bunch of alien organs.”

“Oh.” Ronon was staring at Sheppard’s belly again. At least this time, he didn’t look like he wanted to rip him open and take it out so he could shoot it.

“So, you’ve never heard of this happening to anyone, either?” Sheppard checked.

“No,” Ronon said. “It’s weird.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard agreed. “That’s one word for it.”

He expected Ronon to turn on the laptop then, insert a DVD, and go back to their standard, silent movie-watching routine. Instead, Ronon reached out and pulled the sheet back, suddenly bringing his palm to rest on the curve of Sheppard’s belly where it stuck out from his pants. For a second, Sheppard let him. Mostly out of slowed reflexes, he decided, because in the next second he realized just what that gesture mirrored in the normal world, and violently swatted Ronon’s hand away.

“Knock it off!”

Ronon withdrew his hand. “I felt it.”

Sheppard readjusted the sheet. “You did not.”

“Yeah, I did. Like a flutter.”

“I don’t care,” Sheppard went with. “What movie did you bring?”

Ronon allowed himself to be distracted. Sheppard really hoped the person providing their film library knew enough to remove all movies having to do with pregnancy and birth, too.

“Dawn of the Dead,” Ronon said, tossing the DVD case onto Sheppard’s chest.

“Good. I’m in the mood for a zombie movie,” Sheppard said.

“What’s a zombie?” Ronon asked.

“An undead mindless killing machine who wants to eat the living.”

Ronon blinked at him.

“It’s really violent,” Sheppard assured him, and shoved the disc into the laptop.

He never got to tell Rodney. Teyla and Ronon took it upon themselves to do it for him. Fairly obviously to spare him the unavoidable reaction. Sheppard wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On one hand, it was kind of nice. On the other hand, it reeked of being coddled, like suddenly he was too much of a wilting flower to handle the obnoxiousness of one Dr. Rodney McKay. And then Sheppard got genuinely pissed off about it. He didn’t mind fighting with Rodney; he was good at it _and_ he usually won. And he’d been cooped up for months with medical staff that came running and looked worried if he raised his voice in the slightest. Teyla and Ronon had just robbed him of the best chance of a remotely more interesting day, and that sucked.

Teyla and Ronon also came with Rodney the first time he visited Sheppard after hearing the news. That was pretty funny, actually. They stood on either side of him like a phalanx, as if their mere presence would prevent Rodney from saying something awful. Clearly, they’d learned nothing.

“Hey,” Sheppard said, from his usual spot on the gurney. His incision was long since healed, but Keller insisted he stay hooked up to a thousand monitors and that made moving around the room a giant pain in the ass.

“Hi,” Rodney said. He looked a little browbeaten; Sheppard imagined Ronon and Teyla had both threatened him with bodily harm. He paused, mouth hanging open.

Sheppard waited. He wasn’t disappointed.

“So,” Rodney said. “Think you’re going to grow boobs?”

Teyla inhaled sharply. “Rodney!”

Ronon said nothing, he just immediately smacked Rodney upside the head with the closest hand.

“Ow! Hey!”

“Did we not talk about this!” Hissed Teyla.

“It’s a valid question!” Rodney retorted, moving out of reach of Ronon and rubbing the back of his head. “Watch the brain!”

Sheppard shook his head, exhaled. “In your dreams, McKay.”

“Oh, shut up,” Rodney said. But he didn’t actually have any other horribly insensitive comments, so maybe Teyla and Ronon had gotten most of it out of his system. Sheppard was still kind of annoyed they’d deprived him of that.

Rodney did have some interesting info, though. He tossed a tablet onto Sheppard’s chest, took a seat in the ever-present visitor’s chair. “Anthropologists’ mission report from M3X-371,” he said.

“Which one was that?” Sheppard asked.

“Goat shit planet,” Ronon provided.

“Oh.” Sheppard picked it up. Over the top of the screen, he saw boredom on Ronon’s face and Teyla looking uncertain if they should stay.

“You can go,” he said. “I can hit Rodney myself.”

“Okay,” said Ronon, stepping towards the door.

“Oh, funny,” said Rodney, as Teyla nodded and followed Ronon out. “Did you know that Teyla’s really scary?”

Sheppard ignored him, already reading the document before him. It wasn’t actually from the most recent reconnaissance mission – it was the scientific follow-up to the original mission:  just the typical anthropology report detailing the culture of the natives and analyzing whether their social organization and economy could support engaging in any kind of trade relations with Atlantis. That wasn’t the relevant part. Rodney had highlighted the addendum, where the anthropologists talked at length about matters that were irrelevant to establishing trade relations and were theoretically of interest to other anthropologists.

“The kinship system,” Rodney said, since Sheppard evidently wasn’t reading fast enough. “It…might be related to what happened to you.”

That part of the report was highlighted and Sheppard skipped to it.

“They wanted to go back for more field research,” Rodney said, as he read. “I said no, because who cares. Then they asked to have an actual anthropologist in charge of approving their departmental requests. I denied that, too.”

Sheppard discovered about five seconds into the first paragraph that anthropological language was utterly incomprehensible. He put the tablet down.

“Related to what happened to me how?”

“All four of the tribes living on that mountain trace their origin back to same sex ancestors,” Rodney said. He looked awkward. “They don’t intermarry, either. Well two of them don’t, the other two recently had a Romeo & Juliet type situation and now they will, but before that they didn’t.”

Sheppard wasn’t following. “Point?”

“Same sex founders,” Rodney said, as if it should be clear. “Three sets of patriarchs and one set of matriarchs. No intermarriage. And they made babies.”

“That’s impossible,” Sheppard said.

Rodney looked down at Sheppard’s abdomen. “Really?”

~


	5. Uncertain Thing 5/5

In the end, six people crowded into Sheppard’s Isolation room to have a meeting about the M3X-371 anthropology report. McKay, Teyla, and Ronon, of course, along with Carter, Keller, and the head anthropologist who written the thing. Her name was Lola Ferri and she totally flipped out when she saw Sheppard. At least that meant that the medical staff was doing a reasonable job keeping his condition secret. It was mildly amusing to watch her wave her arms around and babble excitedly, while the nearest person to her tried to get her to stay still and contradicted every positive word out of her mouth while Sheppard was right there. Unfortunately, Sheppard also suspected this meant that her ridiculous kinship report might have something to it. He’d insisted on sitting in a chair like a competent adult for the meeting, his gurney being used as a conference table.

“Wow!” Ferri said, her hands up over her mouth. Keller elbowed her sharply in the side. “Um, well not wow for you. But this is incredible!”

“I think it’s weird and freaky,” Ronon volunteered.

“Please stick to your report content, Doctor,” Carter said, “And remember that this is a sensitive issue.”

“Oh, right.” Ferri tried to compose herself. She didn’t succeed, black pony tail flipping constantly behind her head because she kept turning her face to look at Sheppard. “My initial report included the existence of homogenous mating in the origin stories of the people of M3X-371. That’s not wholly unusual, but I thought that it was interesting that all four communities shared it despite arriving on the planet at different times and having very distinct cultural differences, otherwise.”

“Isn’t ‘origin story’ like a ‘creation _myth_ ,” asked Rodney. “As in, a fairytale?”

“Oral history can’t always be taken at face value,” Ferri said, “But these people have been on M3X-371 for a very short time. They’re Wraith refugees. They haven’t been on that planet longer than two hundred years.”

“Why would that make their story any more true?” Sheppard asked.

Ferri shrugged. “It’s one thing when a myth evolves over millennia. It’s another when you have a great-grandma that says she was there.”

“Okay,” Carter said. “And what exactly did this great-grandma say?”

“That only men survived the culling of her grandparents’ world.” Ferri said. “And that’s what happened with two of the other tribes, as well. The third had only women and infants survive.”

“That happens a lot,” Ronon interrupted. Everyone looked at him. He shrugged. “Squadrons get trapped away from home. Or only women and kids are evacuated.”

“Oh,” Sheppard said. “That makes sense.” But he had the feeling he really, really wasn’t going to like where this was going.

“It also makes sense,” Rodney countered, “that the little orphan boys and girls found each other and made babies the old fashioned way. No pregnant men involved.”

“The communities on M3X-371 have not historically intermarried,” Ferri said. “The only thing they do together is farm goats, and they fight about that a lot.”

“Many peoples who have been culled are very strict about intermarriage,” Teyla said. “When you have lost so many people, it can be vital to maintain the culture and the bloodline.”

“Please, continue,” Carter said. Her face was hard and blank; she was taking this as seriously as Sheppard was.

“When my team was allowed to return recently,” Ferri said, “we were able to find out more. And it was consistent. Every one of these tribes believed they multiplied when two men or two women went up the sacred mountain.”

“Up or in?” asked Rodney, like it mattered.

“In,” Ferri amended.

Sheppard opened his mouth to say something. Nothing came out. It was just too much.

“Why the hell didn’t they mention this when we where there in the first place?” He finally managed to come up with.

“They thought you knew,” Ferri said. “And you were trying to be discreet.”

“But we had Teyla!” Rodney said, jabbing a finger in her general direction.

“One of the elders, I think, suspected why we were asking. He must have known about your original mission,” Ferri went on. “He told me that both fathers must return for the birthing ritual.”

“Both…” Teyla murmured. Her eyes suddenly moved from Sheppard to Ronon.

“What?” asked Ronon.

“Oh my God,” said Rodney.

Sheppard didn’t say anything. But the heart monitor Keller still had him hooked to went crazy. It took him a second, then he ripped the pulse ox off of his finger, threw it on top of the gurney. Keller moved as if to go to him, but he waved her off. That made the flat-line alarm go off, of course, and Keller got up anyway to turn it off. The silence was unbearable, so Sheppard waved his finger at Ferri in a ‘go on’ motion.

Wide-eyed, Ferri continued. “The elder said you – er…they must return for the nourishing gift and the birth. He wouldn’t elaborate.”

“Nourishing gift?” Carter asked.

“Lactation would be my guess,” Keller said.

Sheppard put one hand to his face. He was still speechless. Through his fingers he could see Ronon’s eyes fixed on something on the ceiling, processing the conversation. Or maybe thinking these people were totally fucking crazy.

“Wait a goddamn minute!” Rodney exploded. “You expect us to believe that a bunch of goat herding primitives –”

“Hey-” said Ferri.

Rodney kept going. “How do they get the kid out, huh? Cesarean section? I didn’t see any hospitals. I didn’t see a single sterile surface!”

“In the case of the patriarchs,” Ferri said, solemnly. “Only one survives. That was consistent in their stories, also. They don’t do a cesarean section. Not a proper one, anyway. They just use a knife.”

“Oh,” Rodney said, but his voice was kind of dying in his throat.

“The ‘nourishing gift’ is given to the other one, then?” asked Keller, and she was looking intently at Ronon.

Ronon shifted uncomfortably in his seat, shoulders abruptly hunching.

“Nothing happened to me,” he said.

“Not yet,” said Ferri, maybe unaware of what Ronon looked like when he was violently angry.

“Okay,” said Carter, and her voice had the faint ring of shock in it even as she tried to sound commanding. “First of all, no one is going back to that mountain. Period.”

She kept talking, but Sheppard didn’t hear what she said. He was too busy sliding to the floor as his chair somehow moved out from under him and it suddenly got really noisy and blurry. He vaguely recognized Keller’s fuzzy face leaning over him, but then everything grayed out.

~

When Sheppard woke up, he was back on the gurney and his Isolation room was empty. There was a new IV stand at his bedside and he felt the thick, distancing layer of sedative between him and the world. Keller arrived quickly, asked how he was feeling

The truth was he felt shitty, underneath the chemicals. She said he’d passed out; explained something that had to do with pregnancy, which all of a sudden applied to him because the Pegasus galaxy evidently enjoyed fucking him over. Keller didn’t offer any details on what else the meeting had discussed, but she did say that Ronon was waiting for him to wake up.

“Hey,” Ronon said, when Keller let him in and she stepped outside. He walked to the side of Sheppard’s gurney, put his hand out and rested his fist by Sheppard’s head. Almost like he was putting it there in case Sheppard wanted to _hold it_. And just because Sheppard had recently fainted like a goddamn debutante with the vapors didn’t mean he was going to do that.

“Hey,” Sheppard said, and glared at Ronon’s hand.

“You okay?” Ronon asked, and at least his voice was concerned and not patronizing. Ronon didn’t really do patronizing.

“Yeah,” Sheppard answered, though he knew he sounded thick and tired and not all that okay. “Keller says I don’t have enough blood to get angry. Or something like that. I think she shot me full of tranquilizers.”

Ronon nodded, but he didn’t say anything or move at all, and Sheppard figured he was asking the question in a broader sense.

Sheppard shrugged, annoyed to find that the motion was kind of hard and slow because Keller had doped him. “Yeah,” he said, again. “What else is there to be?”

“It’s just a baby,” Ronon said. And he had the nerve to have the tiniest of smiles on his face. Sheppard decided he had better be trying to be comforting, because if he thought it’d be cute to play proud papa, Sheppard was going to punch him in the face.

“It’s not _in you._ ” Sheppard retorted. He probably didn’t have the strength or focus to sit up – his abdominal muscles were, of course, completely destroyed – but he could probably drag Ronon down and then punch him. All the better if Ronon hit him back.

“Coulda been,” Ronon said, shrugging. He wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t give him the right to be so calm.

Sheppard glared. “You gonna stay cool with it if you grow boobs?” he demanded. 

Ronon’s face flickered, maybe mostly in amusement. “I like boobs,” he said, and Sheppard really did want to punch him. The hand next to Sheppard’s head moved, and Ronon patted him lightly on the shoulder, his face gentle and serious. “It’ll be good.”

Sheppard couldn’t think of a sentiment he disagreed with any more strongly. Coming from Ronon, who was mostly immune to being glowered at, it was bad enough. The entire medical staff seemed to have adopted it as a philosophy for the duration, though.

He understood that they were primarily concerned with and focused on his health, but it did seem like they were purposefully ignoring anything beyond it. He felt worse and worse as the weeks went by, as he got even bigger and less mobile. There were new drugs Keller gave him and new medical apparatus – one a giant hybrid of Ancient and earth technology that fitted over his torso and very clearly wasn’t about monitoring Sheppard. Keller did, finally, sit down with him and deliver a fairly intimidating lecture on the fact that he didn’t just feel like crap because of the drugs, but because there were a lot things wrong with him, namely insanely high blood pressure, and that was why he was on so many drugs. She didn’t dwell on _why_ , since, well, they both knew. In fact, she seemed to be trying to suggest that making him stay in bed with a giant monitor-thing strapped over his abdomen and bunch of machines analyzing his every breath was not wholly out of the ordinary for someone in his condition. Every time she tried to sell this line, he liked to remind her that other people in their third trimesters _did not have a penis_.  

He thought it was an important distinction and got more than a little pissed when she neither agreed nor wanted to argue with him.

“I don’t think this –” he cast an arm around the phalanx of medical instrument that surrounded his bedside – “would work out well if I was a goat herder.”

“No,” Keller said. “It wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean this is all that atypical. There are a lot of high risk pregnancies in women, and they usually don’t survive in communities like that, either.”

Sheppard wondered who she meant by ‘they,’ but didn’t ask.

“There’s nothing normal about this,” he told her. “I fell head first into an alien baby-making factory.”

Maybe Keller was trying to make everything seem less dire, particularly because the high blood pressure lecture had entailed scary words like ‘aneurysm’ and ‘stroke’. As had the one about what would happen if they tried to surgically excise the thing – Sheppard was still calling it that – before enough of the supporting structure had retracted and died off. They weren’t paying much attention to the suggestion that Ronon had dragged him out of that place, could have disrupted however it was supposed to work. But then again, the goat people said he wasn’t supposed to survive anyway.

More irritating was somebody started leaving books about pregnancy and childbirth around his room. Not data pads or websites, which he would have just immediately deleted, but actual books. Sheppard didn’t know where the fuck they came from. He ended up ripping the pages out and making them into paper airplanes. No one said anything about it, presumably because then they would have to admit to putting them there in the first place. Well, McKay criticized his technique and tried to make better, more aerodynamic ones. Teyla made a paper bird instead of a plane. Ronon didn’t want to play.

Another topic that no one talked about was what would happen when this was over. They were, optimistically, presuming Sheppard’s survival. No one had mentioned that there was something that would probably look very much like a human baby involved, and that it, too, might survive. Sheppard had absolutely no idea what to think about that, but it seemed like it should be getting more attention.

There were a few more weeks in Keller’s timetable, and he figured that it would inevitably have to come up. If it was anything like the past few weeks, they already had an extensive plan and were, as usual, just not telling him.

But those weeks never got the chance to come. Everything happened that night, while Sheppard was trying to sleep. It wasn’t easy, given how big and uncomfortable he was and all the stupid gadgets he had to wear. That night he felt especially hot and sweaty, his face flushed and warm. Shortly after that, one of his monitors started making noise and Keller showed up to check on him. She looked over the read outs and her face went very serious.

“What?” asked Sheppard, cranky because this had happened a lot and usually it just resulted in her looking worried while not telling him anything, and then he had even more trouble sleeping.

“It’s time,” she said.

Sheppard tried to sit up, and of course totally failed at it. Keller cranked his gurney up with one hand, the other stabbing something into his IV line. “Why?” he asked.

“Your BP’s stayed above the hypertensive emergency level for too long,” she said, which he didn’t understand at all. “The usual treatment hasn’t brought it down.”

“Whass’at mean?” He asked, realizing his vision was a little blurry and that was new and scary.

“It means organ damage if it doesn’t come down,” Keller said, putting something else in his IV that was probably a sedative because a giant weight was slamming down on his thoughts.

He tried to say something else, but it was too hard and then he was gone.

~

Sheppard didn’t feel much better when he woke up. It felt like a long time had passed, his limbs stiff and his eyelids heavy. His body felt lighter, too, and once he got his eyes open he realized that for the first time in months he wasn’t covered in medical machinery. There was an IV in his wrist and a tube against his thigh that was probably a catheter, but that’s all. Sheppard looked down, saw that the sheets covering him didn’t form the usual mound over his torso. It was over.

But he was still in Isolation, instead of a normal surgical bed. He moved one hand curiously down his chest, immediately felt the swell of surgical gauze bandaged across his abdomen.

Keller walked in second later, her face brighter and more relaxed than he’d seen since this all had started.

“Hey,” she said, smiling. “You’re back with us now?”

“Now?” he said, finding his voice dry and creaky.

“You’ve been in and out for about two weeks,” Keller said, approaching his bedside. “You don’t remember?”

Sheppard shook his. “No.”

“Probably better that way.” She found a pitcher of water and a cup from the table against the wall, poured him some, and handed it over. “First week wasn’t a lot of fun, you were in bad shape.”

He took a sip of the delicious cool water. Tentatively, Sheppard put one hand lightly on his stomach. The pressure made the incision sting, so he quickly moved it back on to the gurney. “It worked?” he asked.

Keller’s head bobbed. “Fifteen hours of surgery, total, but yeah, it’s all out.”

“It?” Sheppard asked, watching her intently.

“The alien tissue is in jars in Xenobiology,” Keller said. “It’s decomposing very quickly, though. I think Lautmann was going to cry.”

Sheppard continued to look at her, because that was very much not answering the question. And she was no longer allowed to keep things from him.

“The baby was a girl,” Keller went on, gently. “Five pounds, six ounces. Totally normal.”

“Alive?” Sheppard asked.

“Oh? Yeah. Healthy. Human.” She looked hesitant. He couldn’t tell why. “We…um… felt we couldn’t ethically deliberately neglect her when we had the ability to –”

She was defending their decision not to kill the kid, which was actually kind of offensive. Sheppard waved the stuttered explanation off.

“Ronon grow boobs?”

Keller blinked, then almost snorted in laughter. “No,” she said, and giggled. “We have a supply of formula, normally used for trading.”

“Oh.”

“She looks like Ronon,” Keller said, softly. “She’s really cute. Really tiny.”

Sheppard half-expected the kid to have Ronon’s dreadlocks, which made for a really amusing mental picture. He didn’t know where she usually was, but when Keller let his team in to visit, the kid was wrapped in a purple blanket and tucked under Ronon’s arm like a football. Sheppard hadn’t expected that, didn’t know if he’d have wanted more preparation for this.

Otherwise, it was kind of normal. Teyla did the Athosian forehead thing with him, told him earnestly how pleased they were that he was alive. As usual, Rodney and Ronon loitered there, neither wanting to share the same kind of affection, which was fine by Sheppard. Well, Ronon was holding a kid. _Their_ kid. That was different.  

“Hey,” he said to both of them. All three of them.

Rodney hadn’t yet made any jokes at his expense, must have gotten them all out his system in the past two weeks.

“Wanna see?” asked Ronon, straight out, dipping his shoulder and holding out the purple blanket.

“I can see,” said Sheppard. The kid didn’t have dreads, of course. She had a head full of curly, poofy black hair and her little face was golden. She did look like Ronon.

“She’s asleep,” said Rodney, “finally.” Like he’d played some role in that. Sheppard squinted at him.

Ronon was still holding his arm out, like Sheppard should take the kid.

“No thanks,” he said, pointing at the surgical bandages under the sheet. “Just got cut open.”

Ronon accepted that excuse, went back to holding the kid like a football.

“They won’t let me hold her,” Rodney said then, in his best tattletale voice. “Everyone gets to hold her except me.”

Sheppard started to laugh, only stopped because his stitches immediately burned. Ronon slanted his eyes dangerously at Rodney.

“That’s probably a good choice,” Sheppard said, holding back his laughter.

At the same time, Teyla said, “You do not pay attention, Rodney.”

“I do, too!” Rodney scowled. “She survived eight and a half months inside Sheppard. I think she can survive anything.”

Ronon cast a dark glance his direction. “You drop her on her head, I’m going to drop _you_ on your head.”

“Let him,” Sheppard said, because at least someone wanted to hold the baby. He didn’t.

It was a bizarre scene, but Ronon made Rodney sit down in the visitor chair, shoved a pillow on his lap, and then gingerly handed the kid over. Teyla moved over, so they were both standing on either side of the chair.

“This what I missed?” Sheppard asked, even though both Teyla and Ronon were both intently watching Rodney.

“Pretty much,” said Ronon.

Ronon and Teyla were right. Rodney didn’t pay attention. Within minutes, the kid was somehow sliding sideways out of his arms. Ronon immediately snatched her up and away, tucking her back tightly under his arm. She slept through the entire thing, which was a useful skill.

“She have a name?” Sheppard asked, vaguely curious. She probably needed one better than ‘kid’.

Ronon looked a little awkward. “Thought you’d want to,” he said.

Sheppard shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “No.”

Ronon didn’t say anything, but Teyla piped up: “Ronon has been calling her Jo.”

“Jo?”

“That’s a boy’s name,” Rodney said. It sounded like maybe he’d said that before.

“Unlike Meredith,” Sheppard said.

“My mom’s name was Joa,” Ronon said. His voice didn’t change at all, but it suddenly sounded heavy and poignant to Sheppard’s ears.

“Oh,” he said. “Jo’s good.”

Ronon gave a little nod, didn’t say anything.

So, that was how Jo got her name. It was probably one of the simpler, least dramatic moments of her entire existence thus far.

~

There were a lot more complicated, dramatic times after that. In between trying to rehab from nearly six months of being basically sedentary, two invasive abdominal surgeries, and what frankly felt like the relocation of most of his internal organs by the entire experience, Sheppard got to have a lot of conversations about what was going to happen to Jo.

He was okay with it not involving him. He wasn’t really involved now. Jo lived in the infirmary and all the nurses and doctors, as well as Ronon and pretty much everyone else who knew she was there took care of her. That was a pretty select number, fortunately. Sheppard had trouble connecting this little baby with the past six months of hell. He’d first thought she was a parasite that was going to kill him, then a parasite that was pretending to be a human baby, which was just sick. The short time he’d known the truth, he’d been uncomfortable and ill, and also pretty heavily in denial.

So, he found he wasn’t sure what he felt. It was unexpectedly touching to watch Ronon with her, because Ronon loved her. Totally. It was, he figured, really fortunate that one of her parents did.

By some miracle, the US Air Force and the Stargate program didn’t yet know about her. Colonel Carter had a fine sense of discretion, had reported only his confinement with an alien illness. It seemed pretty important to Sheppard that no one outside the Atlantis infirmary ever know the truth about her origin. It was too easy to imagine a sick, curious bastard from Area 51 or something equally clandestine wanting to get a look at her.

And that thought made him abruptly really angry, which was probably a normal emotion to have about someone threatening his kid. So that was a healthy reaction, at least.

~

Jo couldn’t stay on Atlantis. That was immediately and painfully obvious. It was already difficult hiding her existence in the infirmary, because her cries echoed down in the entire level. Sheppard’s team was now totally on stand down. Ronon wasn’t going out with any of the other units and Sheppard was still recuperating. But that couldn’t last forever and having the kid in the city struck Sheppard as unbelievably dangerous.

Ronon agreed, and that was why he volunteered to take Jo and go offworld.  And that was totally unacceptable.

“What are you gonna do?” Demanded Rodney. “Tie her to your sword sheath and carry her around on your back while you chase the Wraith?”

Ronon looked at Rodney like maybe that was exactly what he intended to do, and he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

Teyla politely offered Jo a home among the Athosians. Sheppard had the brief image of the baby growing up to be just like Teyla, which wasn’t a bad thing. Except that he also remembered Teyla had grown up living in helpless terror of the Wraith, and that was a bad thing.

Thinking that over made him realize he didn’t want the kid anywhere near the goddamn Wraith.

Taking Jo back to Earth wouldn’t be all that hard, it would just involve lying to everybody. And Sheppard leaving Atlantis. They could tell the SGC Jo was from a dalliance with a Pegasus native, since the gossip mill had him doing that constantly, anyway. And technically, Ronon was a Pegasus native.

Ronon did not like that idea. At all. Well, he probably liked the idea of Jo being in a galaxy that didn’t know the Wraith, but he didn’t like the rest of it.

“You don’t want to do that," he accused Sheppard.

And that was true, in as much that Sheppard had absolutely no idea what he would do when he was back on Earth, with a baby who would no longer be cared for by thirty other people. Sheppard did hold Jo, sometimes. He wasn’t too good at it and Ronon and Teyla watched him almost as closely as they did Rodney. That was annoying, since Rodney nearly dropped her and Sheppard just forgot to support the head.

That brought them around to a less discussed option: sending Jo to Earth while both Sheppard and Ronon stayed on Atlantis.

Sheppard thought it was both mean and impossible. It left a bad taste in his mouth to try to suggest abandoning the baby to a stranger. And he couldn’t imagine who would volunteer to care for a child with two fathers conceived by an alien device in a different galaxy. Not sharing that fact wasn’t an option. Carter didn’t seem to think it was as unlikely as all that; she said her god daughter was an alien who had arrived on Earth with a bomb in her belly.

There’d been one vague discussion of the possibility that any number of sinister things might happen to Jo as she grew. Sheppard didn’t buy it – he was fairly sure the goat people were right about the device in the mountain. It just made baby humans from parents who couldn’t. Pretty damn miraculous for people who didn’t accidentally fall in it.

It was Rodney who finally, awkwardly, suggested a solution.

“I bet my sister would do it,” he said.

“Jeannie?” asked Sheppard, watching the way Ronon’s face was actually soft and open instead of instantly resentful and closed off. That meant he didn’t hate it.

“No,” snapped Rodney. “My other sister. Yes, Jeannie.”

“Yeah?” asked Ronon, his most supportive comment yet.

Rodney shrugged. “She’s trying to have another baby.” He made a face. “Now that we talk, she sometimes tells me things about her ovulation schedule, which is fabulous.” He went on, quickly. “If she’s going to waste her life in childcare, your and Ronon’s genes are probably better than Kaleb’s.”

Sheppard blinked at him. “Let’s not phrase it that way when we ask, huh?”

“Jeannie is a very loving mother,” Teyla piped up, smiling.

Actually asking Jeannie Miller was a lot harder. It wasn’t a matter that could be discussed over the databursts. Sheppard really didn’t like the idea of showing up on her doorstep with her obnoxious brother at his side, an overprotective Satedan looming over them, and a baby in hand. Really, it’d be ideal if he could just take Teyla. Either way, though, it was going to be an ambush and no one could think of any way to prepare her.

Rodney did send her a message he promised was both discreet about the topic but meant she wouldn’t be completely blindsided. Sheppard didn’t get to read it, but he had trouble believing it was any less direct than “Want a baby?”

Sheppard had to tell the SGC about Jo, then. He stuck with the close-to-the-truth lie about the Pegasus native. He was probably going to have to sit through some kind of disciplinary meeting where he got yelled at for not keeping it in his pants. It wouldn’t be fair or accurate, though Rodney said it’d be overdue, anyway. They were more than happy to hear that he’d already concocted a solution to the situation, and had no problem allowing Sheppard and his team – and Jo – to hitch a ride back to Earth next time the Daedalus went through.

Three weeks in space on a military ship with a baby went by very slowly. For the most part, the Daedalus crew restrained themselves from any comments about Sheppard’s lovechild, at least to Sheppard’s face. Possibly because Rodney was doing it for them. It was annoying as hell, but Rodney claimed he was just maintaining their cover story. Sheppard doubted that.

Rodney also spent the trip crowing over how funny he thought it’d be for a kid with Sheppard and Ronon’s genes to grow up in his sister’s household. Even though it’d been his idea.

“I like Jeannie,” said Ronon, not understanding Rodney’s point.

“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “But she is Canadian.”

“And a _genius_.” Rodney said. “And a vegetarian.”

“Vegetables are healthy,” said Teyla.

“I’ll send her beef jerky,” Sheppard said.

“You saying Jo’s gonna be dumb?” asked Ronon, with a threatening eyebrow quirk.

“No,” Rodney said, stepping slightly away. “I didn’t say that. I mean we have to warn Jeannie that this kid is going to start stabbing people and trying to jump off of the roof as soon as she can walk.”

Sheppard started to retort, but Ronon just shrugged. “Gotta be honest.”

He was talking like it was a done deal, but Sheppard was less convinced. He was already contemplating how he’d go about resigning and making arrangements to stay. Those weren’t easy thoughts. He didn’t think Jo deserved a parent as reluctant as he felt, but then again, Sheppard hadn’t deserved to fall down the baby-making shoot.

~

They beamed down in Jeannie’s hometown and got a rental car. Putting Jo into the carseat was a nightmare, because it made the kid very, very angry. Sheppard drove to Jeannie’s house. Rodney got out and went up the doorstep, while everyone else stayed in the car. Ronon tried to clean up Jo so she'd look less like a furious, soggy, red-faced baby. Sheppard didn’t think it really worked, but Ronon did manage to change Jo into a clean, Athosian knit-thing Teyla had had made for her.

Rodney stayed inside Jeannie’s house for nearly half an hour.

“How do you think it’s going?” Sheppard asked Ronon. He could feel the other man getting restless.

“I am sure it is going well,” Teyla said, optimistically from the back seat.

“Bet they just stopped fighting long enough for him to tell her,” countered Ronon.

That seemed disturbingly likely.

Finally, Rodney emerged from the house. He was alone, though, and looked kind of flustered.

“No?” asked Sheppard, when Rodney opened the rear door behind Sheppard.

“I don’t think she believes me.” He said, sounding annoyed. “Kaleb definitely doesn’t.”

“Kaleb has security clearance?’ Sheppard asked. He’d forgotten about that.

“Jeannie has a big mouth,” was all Rodney said. “And he’s in the picture, anyway.”

“I wonder if Jo will learn to speak in the manner of the McKays,” Teyla said, softly behind Sheppard’s ear, and she was smiling.

“They haven’t said yes yet," Sheppard reminded her.

All the same, they all got out of the car. Ronon carried Jo. Sheppard read some tension in his back, and he wondered if he should be feeling guilty because he was more worried they’d say no than anxious about them saying yes.

Jeannie and Kaleb were sitting in their living room. The floor was strewn with Madison’s toys, but the little girl wasn’t in the room. As they entered, Jeannie’s eyes went wide.

“You weren’t kidding,” she said to Rodney.

“No,” Rodney said. “Why would I?”

“Hi,” said Sheppard.

Ronon said nothing. Teyla went forward and embraced Jeannie. “It is good to see you.”

Sheppard took a deep breath. “I don’t know what Rodney told you…”

“He said you and Ronon made a baby that needs a home,” Jeannie said.

“Oh.” Sheppard looked at Rodney, expecting a lot more than that in the half hour he’d spent inside. “Well, yeah. By accident. With alien tech.”

Jeannie was peering at the Jo, concealed in the Athosian knit Ronon had her wrapped in.

Slowly, Ronon moved the fabric so the baby’s face and big brown eyes were exposed.

“This is Jo,” he said, gruffly.

Jeannie looked confused, and then understanding settled on her face. “Oh.” She looked at Sheppard. “My brother said her name was Meredith.”

“I did not,” Rodney objected. “I said it’d be a good middle name.”

“Jo is after Ronon’s mom,” Sheppard said. He was watching Jeannie’s hands kind of twitching at her sides. Her eyes were big and sparkling, already ignoring her brother.

Carefully, Ronon held Jo out and Jeannie gently gathered the baby in to her arms.

“Um, if it makes a difference,” Sheppard said, “The Air Force would set up some kind of child support fund. I haven’t actually spent any of my paychecks in four years, so…”

“Look at that hair,” Jeannie crooned. She’d backed up to the couch, was sitting next to Kaleb again.

“Yeah, good luck ever getting that to be normal,” said Rodney. “Look at these two.”

Sheppard’s chest was feeling kind of warm, watching Jeannie holding the baby. He didn’t know if it was relief or what. Kaleb didn’t look as excited, but he was watching Jeannie’s huge smile.

“Is she…healthy?” he asked, tentatively. “I mean, it shouldn’t be possible…”

“Very healthy,” said Teyla.

“She’s perfect,” said Ronon.

“There are few trusted doctors at the SGC that would be available and be discreet if anything changed in the future,” Sheppard said, understanding what the man was asking. “And we made sure that no one else knew how she came to be, for everyone’s safety.”

Jeannie nodded, making eye contact with Kaleb. “I think we have to talk about this,” she said.

But she made no move to give the baby back, which was probably a good thing. Sheppard’s team shuffled out of the living room, eventually ending up in the kitchen.

“Meredith?” Sheppard muttered at Rodney, who just made a face at him.

He saw Teyla kind of rubbing Ronon’s back. The big guy was pulling his blankest face, but he still didn’t look happy.

Jeannie and Kaleb’s discussion took all of five minutes. And she was totally beaming when she came into the kitchen no longer holding Jo. She hugged all of them really hard, even though Sheppard tried to tell her his torso was still sore, and he awkwardly patted her on the back.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Jeannie whispered into his ear.

Sheppard wanted to say that it was Ronon, not him, who really should  hear those words.

After that, it wasn’t clear what should happen. They went back to the living room, where Kaleb had Jo and was looking just as enchanted as Jeannie. That was really good to see, and Sheppard checked to make sure Ronon noted it, too.

The SGC had documents it would invent. An American birth certificate for Jo with a fictional mother and Sheppard as the father. It didn’t seem fair that Ronon wouldn’t be in there anywhere, but the last thing this situation needed was acknowledgment of any alien involvement. The lawyers would magically straighten out the international adoption paperwork, too, so none of that was really a problem.

It was a simple as leaving the kid with her new parents, but it suddenly seemed bigger and harder. Sheppard glanced at Ronon, tried to read what was going on under the surface. He’d basically made the decision for both of them, wondered now if he had that right.

“I can send pictures,” Jeannie said. “I e-mail Rodney all the time with pictures of Madison. And you’ll come back to see her, right?”

Ronon looked a little happier about that. “Okay,” he said.

Before they left, Ronon held Jo, walked with her around the house by himself. Sheppard just kissed her on the cheek while Jeannie held her. He ruffled her hair, surprised himself by already thinking of her as Jeannie’s daughter. That was good, he figured.

There’d be stuff later. Like telling the kid she’d been conceived in another galaxy, had two biological dads, one of whom had called her a parasite for her entire unborn life.

As Sheppard’s team walked out to the car, Sheppard stuck his arm up and around Ronon’s back, digging under his dreadlocks ‘til he found the back of the man’s neck and gave it a squeeze.

“She’ll come back to Pegasus when she’s big,” he said. “Help us kick Wraith ass.”

Ronon looked at him sideways. “Aren’t gonna be any Wraith when she’s big,” he said. “We’re gonna kill them all before she comes back.”

 

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